When Winter Ashburn finds herself talking to a toff in a stable while pilfering from his saddlebags, little does she realize that a few hours later she will be nursing him back to health from a serious head wound.
Rory Jameson, the rake who is also the Earl of Huntington, plans to pay a short visit to his grandfather and then get on with life.
But Rory and Winter have some kind of connection, and Rory finds himself drawn into helping renew the estate as well as seeing more of Winter.
But there are people about who have nefarious plans, secrets from the past, and someone
who may be trying to stop Rory.
Passion and Pleasure in London
is an oddly disjointed read lacking clear narrative flow. We mostly follow the story from Winter's eyes, occasionally jumping to Rory's point of view, but the stuttering nature of the tale makes it hard to
remain interested. The title seems a misnomer: the story takes place in a small village near Henley, not in London, and
the characters regularly speak American rather than 1870's English. They also, rather surprisingly,
sight an animal not native to Europe (a Groundhog) and liken a group of people to 'chickadees', a name for a bird not used in Europe (we would call the bird a 'tit'). The author's research has clearly let her down here.
The mystery aspect of Passion and Pleasure in London is revealed in the last few pages in an awkward way, but then I wasn't entirely convinced by the plots anyway. The central romance
is believable between these two mercurial characters, but by the end of the book I didn't really care that much for them.