THE LOVE REMEDY

A Victorian apothecary finds chemistry with the investigator she hired to retrieve her stolen medical formula.

In the first installment of Everett's Damsels of Discovery series, private inquiry agent Jonathan Thorne meets Lucinda Peterson as she's asking his colleague to murder her former lover. Having inherited a small London apothecary, Lucy is shouldering the family business, with its working-class clientele, while being hounded by a moralist group that denounces nontraditional gender roles. To make matters worse, her ex, the son of a rival, decamped with the sore throat remedies she created. Though he had promised that their sexual relationship was a prelude to marriage, he dumped her as soon as he got her formula, even claiming that her enthusiastic sexuality made her unsuitable for marriage. When she hires Thorne—really to get back the formula, not kill her former lover—she doesn't know that he's the son of a baron, a once-dissolute boxer who turned his back on his aristocratic family to raise his biracial child with his late mistress. Devoted to his daughter, he now lives rigidly to guard against his alcoholism and venal tendencies. Meeting Lucy rouses his fierce passions as well as his wariness about beautiful women. Though he is discomfited by her stance on contraception and abortion, her devotion to her patients and her family forces him to question his dogmas about “good” women and examine the behavior of men. Lucy, in turn, has to decide if loving Jonathan is worth the risk to her heart and body. Scenes of their charged sexual interactions featuring light kink are interspersed with fraught conversations on bodily autonomy and balanced out by warm Dickensian family episodes.

Melancholy and sexy in turns, a neo-Victorian love story that puts reproductive rights at the heart of a romance.