“Jealous people are always in competition with their object of jealousy” – M. C. Beaton in Romance (Daughters of Mannerling #5).
Reading “Romance” was a great delight as the “Beverly Sisters” were once again obsessed with their ambition to regain their old home “The Grand Mannerling Estate”. It’s new owner Lord St. Sinclair whose father had gifted Mannerling on the condition that he marries a wife and starts a family hates the place but his cousin Peregrine is in love with the estate and hopes for his uncle to disinherit his ungrateful son and give him Mannerling instead. Belinda Beverly finds Sinclair a fop and all things that she dislikes but feels it her duty to marry him to enable her family regain Mannerling although she finds “The Marquis” Lord Gyre more agreeable. The fact that Mannerling is suspected to be a haunted house with it’s tinkling chandelier and the alleged sighting of ghosts it makes matters worse for Belinda.
Filled with a lot of plotting, scheming and gossip, this book is a welcome addition to this series. It is funny and racy read that got me glued to it until I got to the end.
Lady Beverly was still as annoying as ever and Sinclair’s vanity was so hilarious that I laughed out loud many times. Miss Trumble remains my favorite character and the mystery around her past still keeps me curious so I am jumping straight to the next and last book in this series “The Homecoming”.
With several sub plots laced around the main plot, this is a light, enjoyable read and I highly recommend this book to all romance lovers.
Rating: 4 Stars
Published: 2014 by Constable and Robinson
Pages: 194
Genre: Historical Romance
Purchase Audio Book @ www.audible.com/romance
The Author: Marion Chesney was born on 1936 in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, and started her first job as a bookseller in charge of the fiction department in John Smith & Sons Ltd. While bookselling, by chance, she got an offer from the Scottish Daily Mail to review variety shows and quickly rose to be their theatre critic. She left Smith’s to join Scottish Field magazine as a secretary in the advertising department, without any shorthand or typing, but quickly got the job of fashion editor instead. She then moved to the Scottish Daily Express where she reported mostly on crime. This was followed by a move to Fleet Street to the Daily Express where she became chief woman reporter. After marrying Harry Scott Gibbons and having a son, Charles, Marion went to the United States where Harry had been offered the job of editor of the Oyster Bay Guardian. When that didn’t work out, they went to Virginia and Marion worked as a waitress in a greasy spoon on the Jefferson Davies in Alexandria while Harry washed the dishes. Both then got jobs on Rupert Murdoch’s new tabloid, The Star, and moved to New York.
Anxious to spend more time at home with her small son, Marion, urged by her husband, started to write historical romances in 1977. After she had written over 100 of them under her maiden name, Marion Chesney, and under the pseudonyms: Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, Helen Crampton, Charlotte Ward, and Sarah Chester, she getting fed up with 1714 to 1910, she began to write detectives stories in 1985 under the pseudonym of M. C. Beaton. On a trip from the States to Sutherland on holiday, a course at a fishing school inspired the first Constable Hamish Macbeth story. They returned to Britain and bought a croft house and croft in Sutherland where Harry reared a flock of black sheep. But Charles was at school, in London so when he finished and both tired of the long commute to the north of Scotland, they moved to the Cotswolds where Agatha Raisin was created.
