A GOVERNESS'S GUIDE TO PASSION AND PERIL

Collins adds another heroine to her Ladies Most Scandalous Series, featuring a coterie of free-thinking Regency ladies who are dedicated criminologists.

Jane Halliwell’s father, a British ambassador to Rome, died by suicide, and the Foreign Office hushed it up. Mr. Halliwell, it seemed, had lost a fortune at the gaming tables. His wife and daughter, disgraced and penniless, were forced to leave Italy. Mrs. Halliwell was taken in by a Scottish cousin, who had room only for one, so Jane became a governess to the family of her father’s old colleague Viscount Gilford. In the guise of a weeklong international symposium to study advances in horticulture, Gilford has invited the future ruler of Roskovia—from whom the British hope to buy a cutting-edge communications machine—to stay at his home in London and planned a formal dinner. In a satisfying literary device, a reluctant Jane is ordered to leave the schoolroom when a guest sends her regrets and Lady Gilford requires an extra woman to keep an even count at table. Also attending is “breathtakingly handsome” Lord Adrian Fielding, who was Jane’s girlhood crush when he was a young diplomat in Rome. He notices she is no longer a girl, and she learns how deeply he regrets having had to leave her family at their time of need. After dinner, asked to fetch a shawl for Lady Gilford, Jane finds the viscount in his study with a knife through his chest. Scotland Yard DI Eversham (whose wife is co-author of the newspaper column “A Lady’s Guide to Mischief and Mayhem”) tells Jane and Adrian that Gilford was found with a quotation from Machiavelli’s The Prince in his pocket, along with a pressed rose. Jane suddenly remembers that her father was also found with Machiavelli and a pressed rose among his belongings—which means that her father did not die by suicide. The sleuths discover that another diplomat who was in Rome at the same time also died mysteriously with a similar quotation and flower. The pair’s passion for uncovering the identity of the serial killer charges and embraces their deepening passion for each other.

Collins’ crime/romance combination continues to be a fun and successful formula.