Secrets of a Proper Lady
She went looking for the truth about the stranger she was being made to marry. She gave a false name to do it. So did he. He gave hers.
Overview
Two liars, one park, and a very well-kept list of questions
Lady Cordelia is told, in a perfectly civil conversation with her father, that the family shipping line is in trouble and the repair is a merger with an American industrialist, sealed by marrying his son. She has never met the son. Her own summary of the arrangement is drier than anything I could write: “To preserve the family fortune I must agree to marry a man I have never met. An American no less.”
So she does the sensible thing, which is also the completely insane thing. She goes to the park, approaches a strange man, and starts interrogating him about her intended. To protect herself she gives her cousin’s name, Miss Sarah Palmer. The man gives his name as Warren Lewis and offers to tell her everything she wants to know about Mr. Sinclair.
What makes it work is that the book refuses to let either of them be the wronged party. She lied first. He lied better. The bargain that starts it is made out loud on page 27, and it is fair on its face: “If I am to tell you Mr. Sinclair’s secrets, I should expect to learn some of Lady Cordelia’s in return.” Both of them agree to it. Both of them are cheating.
The boring bit
Receipts
Story plotline
Three ways in, and every one of them ruins the surprise
The plot page is the full sequence with page numbers. The arcs page follows the two people separately, because they are running different races. The tropes page is where I argue about what the book is actually doing with the disguise.
What actually happens
The merger, the false names, the questions, Brighton, the moment she works it out, the masked ball, the letter she never opened, and a wedding conducted in a temper.
One is auditioning, one is hiding
She is trying to find out whether she can live with him. He is trying to find out whether she wants him or his name. Only one of them is being tested, and it is not the one who thinks so.
Mistaken identity, held with both hands
Most disguise plots collapse the moment someone could just say it. This one makes not saying it the actual character work, which is the difference between a gimmick and a premise.
Characters
Who you are dealing with
Three here. The rest, including the sisters, the four criminally useful nephews and the butler who accidentally gives the whole thing away, are on the character page.
Lady Cordelia
Twenty-five, still under her parents’ roof, and entirely capable of climbing out of a window to get an answer. She is not rebelling against the marriage. She is doing due diligence on it, which is far more dangerous.
Daniel Sinclair
American, self-made in railroads, and estranged from the father whose money he refused. He borrows a friend’s name to find out whether an English lady would want him without one.
Sarah Palmer
Cordelia’s cousin and paid companion, whose name gets borrowed without much consultation and whose own romance is quietly the most straightforward thing in the book.
The series
Four men, four shillings, and a bottle nobody wanted to win alone
The epilogue of this book is where the whole series finally explains itself. Four friends put four shillings and a bottle of cognac into a tontine on staying unmarried. The club held the stake. One by one the chairs at their table emptied, and as the last man puts it, “it wasn’t as if they were dead. They were simply married.”
A Little Bit Wicked
Viscount Warton, toasted in this book’s epilogue as the man “who found what he didn’t believe existed.”
What a Lady Wants
Nigel Cavendish, toasted as the man “who discovered the prize is sometimes worth the sacrifice.”
Seduction of a Proper Gentleman
Oliver, who ends this book standing on a table in an emptying club, holding four coins and winning by default.
The author
Who wrote it
Victoria Alexander
Reliable at the thing that is hardest to fake: banter that sounds like two intelligent people enjoying each other rather than two mouths delivering jokes.
She never lets the lie be one-sided
The easy version of this plot has a deceiving hero and an innocent heroine. Alexander gives them the same crime and then refuses to rank them, which is why the third act has any teeth.
RaeRae Reviews
The verdict
The best premise in the series so far
Two liars with equal standing is a genuinely better engine than one rake and one wronged woman. Where it wobbles: the inheritance clause arrives late and does a lot of heavy lifting for a device we had not been told about.
Three down, two to go
Not yet. The series hub holds the tontine, the toasts and the running order until there is a real verdict to give.
RaeRae Reacts
Four scenes I would like on the record
One is a crime spree with children, one is a farce, one is the smartest decision anybody makes in the book, and one is a wedding held at knifepoint by good manners. All four open into the full react.
She sneaks out with four nephews
She wanted one escort. She got four, aged ten to nearly twelve, because they caught the first one and blackmail runs in the family. “If she didn’t get married perhaps she could have a successful career as a burglar or jewel thief.”
The real Sarah Palmer walks in
She goes straight into Viscount Creswell’s arms. Daniel, who has been calling somebody else Miss Palmer for weeks, says “I really don’t know her.” He is ignored. Twice.
Brown, sir. Green, sir. Definitely green
A butler describes her through a half-shut door and she realizes what the questions are for: he has met the real Sarah. He knows. And she decides, brilliantly, not to tell him she knows.
Yes, yes. I will, I do. Go on
He whispers that she never answered his letter. She says she never read it. He says he does not want it to end this way. She says he should have thought of that. Then she marries him at speed.
RaeRae Rants
One thing I am not letting go
The letter nobody made her read
An entire third act runs on a document that exists, was delivered, and goes unopened. The pain is real, the anger is earned, and it is still a plot held together by one woman’s refusal to look at an envelope.
She had the better reason
She had just found out the man might need the marriage for an inheritance. Refusing to read his explanation is not stupidity, it is self-protection. I am still cross about it, but I would probably have done the same.
Novel 101
Things the book assumes you already know
What a tontine actually is
A real financial instrument, genuinely banned in places for the obvious reason, and the joke underneath this entire five-book series. Why the last survivor takes everything.
Red flags, green flags, and why the hot one is never the test
Useful here, because both leads spend the novel gathering evidence on each other and reaching confident conclusions from incomplete information.
Read directly from the novel, Kindle edition, and described in our own words. · Last Man Standing · Victoria Alexander · The Library