Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

The “good news:” This gorgeous cover (you had me at “art” and “Paris”) made me snatch this book right off the shelf at my local library (shout out to Aspen Hill Library, a branch of Montgomery County Public Libraries, Montgomery County, Maryland). It had been a long week and I was needing to read my way to recovery, so I polished this one off in less than 48 hours.

The “bad news:” This is NUMBER 7 IN A SERIES I had not heard of before. So, yeah, I’m missing ALL of the backstory on the Countess of Harleigh!

Reading a series out of order is something I almost never do, except by accident, like this time. I like to follow the story line along with the characters in the series, not jump around like those giant cricket-spider hybrid monster things that appear out of nowhere when you walk into your garage.

All that being said (I know, I know, get to the point), I really enjoyed this book. Maybe it was the Victorian-ness of it all, or the fact that the action quickly moves from London, England, to Paris, France, during the time of the Paris Exposition. A lot of the plot points of this super clean and completely spice-less cozy mystery novel really appealed to me: Paris, afternoon tea, starving artists, cafés, murder, mistresses, money, perfume, and more.

The protagonist Frances is pure Victorian, changing clothes multiple times a day, her lady’s maid tsk-tsking over the rumpled and soiled state of her morning dress, needing an escort to walk the streets of Paris, but she is also—as the book jacket states—“charmingly independent” and on her second marriage. I, of course, having dived into this storyline way down the road, have no idea what happened to marriage #1 except that there is a young daughter, who is also purely Victorian as she is not seen nor heard of in this novel.

This quick read was just what I needed last weekend, and I really look forward to beginning the series with book #1 in the very near future.