THE COUNTERFEIT SCOUNDREL

The first entry in Heath's The Chessmen: Masters of Seduction series of neo-Victorian romances examines divorce and women’s happiness.

David Blackwood, known to his friends as Bishop, is a wealthy investor who has acquired a reputation for having illicit affairs with married women which have led to their husbands’ divorcing them. Few know that David merely agrees to be named as a lover in order for unhappy women to escape their marriages in the only way possible under existing British law. Marguerite “Daisy” Townsend is a private detective who’s spying on Blackwood on behalf of a man who's convinced his wife is being unfaithful. The first time she meets David, while she's posing as a maid in his household, they both feel an instant attraction. Perplexed by the attentions David pays her while keeping standing appointments with a succession of women and by her own feelings, Daisy nevertheless wants to find the evidence her client needs. That client turns out to have unusual intentions, and an unrelated woman David is aiding might be concealing something as well. As David and Daisy become lovers, soap-operatic plot twists appear, weaving in her past and her parentage with his present do-gooder activities and daddy issues. The novel grapples with how a man might enact feminist principles without upsetting the genre’s commonplaces, including social rules about fidelity, with limited success.

For fans of the lady detective subgenre of historical romance.