The Best Ending in the Series
Book three had the better premise. This one knows how to land, which turns out to matter more.
The short version
A fake amnesia plot with two skeptics, a curse the novel refuses to adjudicate, the best supporting cast in the series, and a final page that reaches back four books to collect a debt I did not know was outstanding.
What it gets right
It fixes amnesia by faking it
Amnesia is the trope I trust least, because a character with no memory has no agency and the reader ends up waiting for a doctor. Alexander sidesteps the whole problem: Kate is not injured, remembers everything, and is lying on that sofa on purpose.
Flip it and every objection reverses. Her slips cost her something. Her recovery is a decision she times. She holds the information and has to pretend she does not. It is an impostor story, which is a genre I like, wearing a bandage. Longer argument in the tropes page and a proper airing in the rant.
Both leads are skeptics, which is the brave choice
The default version gives you a believing heroine and a rational hero she softens. Here neither believes. Kate calls herself the only practical woman in a family of mystics and refuses her aunt’s potion in the first scene. Oliver calls the curse superstitious nonsense and means it.
So the question stops being is the curse real and becomes what do you do about a risk you cannot evaluate. That is a much better question, and the book gets a genuinely good answer out of it.
The supporting cast is the strongest in the series
Hollinger the butler is worth the price on his own. Openly allied with the countess against his own employer’s bachelorhood, and the only person who will state Oliver’s dilemma to his face, which he does in one immaculate sentence and then calls a summary.
The grandmother is better still and she is the one who resolves the plot. She believes in the curse entirely and defeats it with a logical dilemma rather than a spell, then refuses to overclaim the result: “Shall we simply say there was a curse and perhaps now there isn’t.” The most superstitious character in the book is also the most rigorous.
It never settles the supernatural, and that takes nerve
Every uncanny event arrives with a mundane explanation attached, and the book hands you both and walks away. Three slates nearly brain Oliver and he immediately produces a completely plausible account involving recent roof repairs, agrees a superstitious person might read it as a sign, confirms that he is not one, and cancels his trip anyway.
Nobody converts. People hedge while denying there is anything to hedge against, which is precisely how real people handle luck.
The last page
I will not restate it here because it deserves to arrive in order. It is in the reacts if you want it. What I will say is that four books of a running joke about a wager turn out to have been load-bearing, and the payoff is one line of dialogue and a remark about a cloak.
What does not work as well
The middle sags
Between the arrival and the uncle’s appearance there is a lot of country house. The charade generates good individual scenes but the plot does not advance much between roughly a third and two thirds of the way through, and the book is coasting on charm during it. That complaint was formed on the first, sampled pass through that stretch.
The scheme is instrumental and mostly forgiven
Kate’s original plan is to marry a man to fix a supernatural problem without telling him. That is using a person, and the novel is softer on it than book three was on Daniel’s equivalent unannounced test.
It is partly earned back, because she ends the deception herself before she is forced to and is ultimately prepared to lose him rather than risk him. But nobody ever quite says to her face what she was doing, and I wanted one scene where somebody did.
The three young interrogators vanish
Gen, Belle and Sophie get one superb scene and then largely disappear from the pages I read. Given how much energy that scene has, they feel underused.
Who should read it
| You will like it if | You will not if |
|---|---|
| You want a heroine running a con she disapproves of | Country house pacing bores you |
| You like servants who are smarter than their employers | You need the supernatural resolved definitively |
| You have read books one to three and want the payoff | This is your first in the series |
| Amnesia plots usually annoy you and you want to see one done right | Amnesia is a hard no regardless |
Where it sits in the series
Book three, Secrets of a Proper Lady, has the better premise: two liars with equal standing is a stronger engine than one woman with a plan. But it resolves on an unopened letter, which is a third act balanced on one leg.
This one has the weaker middle and by far the better close. A grandmother arguing a curse into submission, flowers blooming in the wrong season, and four coins coming home beats an envelope nobody read.
Read them in order. Book four is the one the series was building toward, and reading it first would waste the only real trick these novels have.
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