Review: The Scandalous Spinster

I love historical romances featuring unconventional heroines. What I don't love are historical romance heroines who flaunt the rules, get caught with their hand in the cookie jar, and then are shocked (SHOCKED!) when the consequences of their actions bite them in the butt. Look, history is obviously littered with women who flaunted convention and broke the rules - but that didn't make them stupid. They knew the world they were living in, knew what the societal mores of the time were, and they understood that being unconventional could have very real consequences. Which means they either had to not care or be very sneaky about it. Romance heroines who don't know this are just stupid. Blessedly that is not the type of heroine we have in The Scandalous Spinster by Alyxandra Harvey. She's very well aware of the rules and is very sneaky about circumventing them.

Lady Clara Prescott is a woman who contains multitudes. She's a very proper, downright prudish, spinster. Firmly on the shelf. And that's all she wants you to see. Lady Clara's real talent is being invisible. Dismissed. Wholly ignored.  It's the perfect disguise for her and her work with The Spinster Society, a group of women who help women by making known the names of men who are not what they seem. Fortune hunters, cads, privileged louts who think nothing of defiling innocents and robbing heiresses blind, among other things. 

Clara's disguise is perfect. She's 29, firmly on the shelf, and attends society events mainly out of pity. She's the type of woman who blends into the wallpaper. Nobody notices her other than to hurl the occasional snide remark her way, and her painfully proper no-fun reputation (butter wouldn't melt in her mouth) provides the perfect cover to be sneaky, gather information and eavesdrop. Unfortunately this disguise is so good that even her comrades in The Spinster Society underestimate and under-utilize her. She's desperate for some excitement. She gets her chance when a colleague, working to protect and rescue an heiress being held captive by her guardian, goes missing.

Clara's job is to infiltrate a notorious country house party. Much debauching, much gambling, the kind of place you wouldn't expect Lady Clara to be. Coming with her on this mission is Captain Bram Thorn, a former scarred, tattooed, Navy man who works for the Spinsters mainly out of gratitude for helping his sister out of a spot of trouble. The fly in the ointment? These two are painfully attracted to each other. But Bram, a low born Scottish former sailor, on the other side of forty, knows that any attraction to the very proper, well above his station, and frankly too young for him, Clara Prescott is madness.

What happens next is that these two get to the house party, which is stuffed to the gills. Thrown into the Dower House on the property, they begin snooping around, only to discover a series of baffling clues left behind by the missing Spinster, Sybil. There's also rumors flying around that the heiress, ward to the man hosting the house party, is not the first girl to go missing at the manor. 

This is one of the better historical romances I've read this year, and Clara is a sneaky, conniving delight. Bram is a hero in protector mode, there to keep her safe but who doesn't hold her back. He's not one of those heroes who wants her to step aside, hide in a corner, while he takes on all comers. Yes, she goes off snooping and yes he gets irritated (he can't protect her if he's not there), but these are two characters who don't want to hold each other back.

My only quibble with the book is that the plot is too busy. Clara, Bram, the missing Sybil, heiress and two other girls (it turns out) is more than enough - especially for a book that only clocks in around 250 pages. Instead, we get a kitchen sink tossed in.  Clara, among her other talents, writes salacious novels under a pen name.  Someone has uncovered her true identity and is now blackmailing her. This blackmail plot truly is an afterthought, tossed in on occasion, and while Clara is concerned (being unmasked would blow her cover sky-high, not to mention the real consequences to her reputation) it's not like she's sitting around, wringing her hands over it. The missing Sybil and heiress are the main driving force here. I suspect the blackmailer, who is unmasked at the end, is mainly tossed in to sow seeds for a future installment in this series, but that's a guess. Regardless, if felt wholly unnecessary to this story.

Quibble aside, I enjoyed this story and have plans to not only keep up with this series but read more by Harvey. It was a lot of fun, with good romantic chemistry, a compelling plot, and some light mystery elements tossed in for flavor. 

Final Grade = B