Monday, December 7, 2020

The Lady and the Highwayman by Sarah M. Eden

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Romance, Historical Romance
Content: Clean

 

Elizabeth Black is the headmistress of a girls’ school in 1830s Victorian London. She is also a well-respected author of ”silver-fork” novels, stories written both for and about the upper-class ladies of Victorian society. But by night, she writes very different kinds of stories--the Penny Dreadfuls that are all the rage among the working-class men. Under the pseudonym Charles King, Elizabeth has written about dashing heroes fighting supernatural threats, intelligent detectives solving grisly murders, and dangerous outlaws romancing helpless women. They contain all the adventure and mystery that her real life lacks.

Fletcher Walker began life as a street urchin, but is now the most successful author in the Penny Dreadful market, that is until Charles King started taking all of his readers. No one knows who King is, including Fletcher’s fellow members of the Dread Penny Society, a fraternity of authors dedicated to secretly fighting for the social and political causes of their working-class readers. The group knows King could be an asset with his obvious monetary success, or he could be the group’s undoing as King’s readership continues to cut into their profits.

Determined to find the elusive Mr. King, Fletcher approaches Miss Black. As a fellow-author, she is well-known among the high-class writers; perhaps she could be persuaded to make some inquiries as to Mr. King’s whereabouts? Elizabeth agrees to help Fletcher, if only to insure her secret identity is never discovered. What neither author anticipated was the instant attraction, even though their social positions dictate the impossibility of a relationship.

For the first time Elizabeth experiences the thrill of a cat-and-mouse adventure reminiscent of one of her own novels as she tries to throw Fletcher off her scent. But the more time they spend together, the more she loses her heart. Its upper-class against working-class, author against author where readers, reputations, and romance are all on the line.



I read the second book in this series The Gentleman and the Thief before reading this one and I gave it 3 stars because I liked it but didn't love it. Now that I've read this one I think maybe my reading experience would have been improved a bit by knowing what I know now (they are companion novels), but I think my rating would still have been 3 stars even if I had read this one first. 

I have to say that this book, in my opinion is better. I enjoyed the overall story more, and the Penny Dreadful stories that are included were more interesting to me in this book as well, although I still didn't like the way they interrupted the main story. I did think that Fletcher should have been smart enough to figure out who Mr. King was long before he did. That part just felt dragged out for the sake of keeping the subterfuge going and not because it made sense.

The third book in the trilogy (I'm assuming it's a trilogy) is being published in August and I will definitely read it.

Of course I had to look up some real Penny Dreadfuls and these are some of the ones I found:

 



 

 





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