I truly love this series; it ranks as one of my very favorites. Maybe that is why I feel so disappointed. Still, I felt honor bound to listen to the whole book on audio; however, I didn’t enjoy it until I took periodic breaks and went to my Kindle version to re-read sections.

3.75 stars
Bottom Line, Up Top. A must-read for Maiden Lane series addicts (i.e. anyone who has read them—and everyone should!). Not my favorite of the series unfortunately, but both main characters were fantastic and a great pairing; the secondary characters were lovely as well. There was just a certain spark missing, which has always been present in all the other Elizabeth Hoyt books I've loved (of which there are a number!!).

Review. This wasn't a home run for me, but it was by no means bad. As always, Hoyt delivers with her Maiden Lane series and I am looking forward to finally finishing this wonderful series before I have to pack up all my books and pack them in storage—it will get done!!

I really enjoyed Megs and Godric and thought their pairing was very well done; she's lightness and happiness, as he often describes her, but she is by no means flighty or lacking in substance; losing Roger, her first love, fiancé, and father of the child she miscarried, was devastating for her and she still feels that loss very strongly. They are both broken-hearted people, with Godric still mourning the loss of his beloved first wife, Clara. Only one or two years after getting married, Clara fell sick and she basically just slowly died of a wasting disease over the course of 9 years.

And one has to wonder, which is worse? A sudden, unexpected loss of your partner, or watching them slowly die and not being able to do anything to help them. Of course, there is no answer to such a question, but the contrast gives each of them their own "flavor" of sorrow. Megs is driven to revenge herself on Roger's murderer and bring him to justice, while Godric exhausts himself trying to save the people of St. Giles, as he could never save Clara.

The setup is well-done: Megs is determined to have a child, and so although she and Godric have not seen one another for two years since they got married, she randomly shows up out of the blue one night and intends to take up residence in London with him. For the reason of procreation, he soon finds out (her initial attempts to seduce him are quite funny). I don't normally like romances where one of the characters had a previous love, because I want to be able to believe that they completely love the hero/heroine, but in this Hoyt very easily convinced me that this was the case. I think it also helped that both the hero and heroine had had a "true love" before, so they were both in the same boat in that sense, so to speak.

Godric was so sweet to Megs that there were some points initially where I resented her and how she was keeping herself separate from him. I understood her conflicting feelings and her fear of betraying Roger, but what about Godric? He was going through the exact same thing, but put that aside for her sake. She does realize this relatively quickly and I'm glad that that didn't drag on for too long, because that would have really annoyed me.

I don't know what exactly keeps me from giving it a 4-star rating, but the fact was, I was able to put the book down several times and do other things in my life ... and that normally doesn't happen with a really good romance book. While it had all the right ingredients, there was just a little spark missing for me, that prevented me from being completely sucked in and taken on the journey with the characters. I really did love Godric though—how can anyone not?! He's such a good, decent guy and so alone and isolated; Megs is exactly what he needs.

*This review should be of an ARC provided by NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review—but my book-buying obsession got the better of me and I had to buy the paper copy, and that's the copy I ended up reading. #noselfcontrol but also #noshame

Lady Margaret Reading has vowed to kill the Ghost of St. Giles—the man who murdered her one true love. Returning to London, and to the man she hasn’t seen since their wedding day, Margaret does not recognize the man behind the mask. Fierce, commanding, and dangerous, the notorious Ghost of St. Giles is everything she feared he would be—and so much more.

When passion flares, these two intimate strangers can’t keep from revealing more of themselves than they had ever planned. But when Margaret learns the truth—that the Ghost is her husband—the game is up and the players must surrender…to the temptation that could destroy them both.

For readers just encountering Elizabeth Hoyt this will be a delightful introduction to her wit and writing expertise, a really good historical romance full of the verve and vitality she brings to all her work. For those of us who have been enjoying her Maiden Lane series, this novel keeps the stories coming that revolve around a mysterious individual known as the Ghost of St. Giles, a do-gooder who seems able to appear and disappear at will, whose singular focus is keeping the worst evils at bay for the residents of this less-than-noble section of old London. The main characters in this novel were introduced in the previous novel, but now their story picks up after a couple of years have elapsed. That they are married is almost incidental to the story–Margaret or “Megs” as she was known in a previous novel, was bereft after the murder of her lover, a man she was set to marry and with whom she now shared a baby. Her reputation in shreds, Godric was prevailed upon to give her his name. He did so with the understanding that she would spend her life apart from him at one of his country estates. But there is a truism that states that ” . . . when one is making plans, life happens.” So it was with these two.

It is obvious that the main characters in this novel are at odds for a variety of reasons. Both were nursing deep hurts, both were living in the past to different degrees, but that is where their hearts lay. Both had closed themselves off from any future romantic involvement and both were simply “putting in their time.” Reality did intrude upon these two, and that is where the “battle is joined,” a battle that involved their dormant emotions, their sense of right and wrong, and the sense of violation done to justice. For Margaret the injustice of her lover’s death never left her. For Godric, he faced the injustice done to the residents of St. Giles in the only way he knew how: appearing and disappearing as the infamous Ghost, often engaging the authorities who had made it their mission in life to apprehend him, coming away from those encounters severely injured, but managing to preserve his real identity. That is, until his own wife came very close to unmasking him.

There is a pervasive energy in this book, born from the tension between Margaret and Godric, the deep angers both harbored over the hurts in their personal situations, that deep divide between the “haves” and the “have-nots” as well as the life situation both found themselves in because of their “marriage in name only” that threatened to become far more. As always, Ms Hoyt brings a fine level of historical authenticity to the story, evidenced by her knowledge of life for those who survived in the underbelly of London’s less than beautiful localities. Add her insightful perceptions of the workings of human feeling and emotion, the human response to good and evil as well as the reality of dealing with loss that death inflicts, and the reader is treated to a novel that is a literary buffet for the mind and emotions. It is simply impossible to read this novel without putting one’s self into the story, empathizing with the losses both Margaret and Godric experience, wanting Godric to succeed even though he is placing himself in danger at escalating degrees.

It is also obvious that this novel is beautifully written, the flow of the story is measured and teased out sothat the reader is led from crisis to crisis, treated to a plot that may be similar to other historical romances but yet bears the stamp of original thinking. It is historically correct that there were many who worked hard to lighten the burden of those who never knew what abundant living felt like, whose experience in life was the gut wrenching reality of merely surviving and often that wasn’t enough. Yet to have someone like the Ghost appearing at mysterious times, making his escape over the rooftops of London tenement housing, rescuing young children from the horrors of the illegal workhouses, willing to take on personal hurts on their behalf had to be a curious way of giving the residents of St. Giles a sense that there really was a “higher power” who was concerned for their safety and well-being. Whether or not such a person ever existed is not the question. Rather, it is an inventive creation on the part of this author to give readers insight into the needs and injustices of people long forgotten these many generations later.

It is obvious that I like Hoyt’s writing, her way of telling a story, the unique and fascinating ways she has of bringing unlikely characters into her stories and into each other’s lives, and her knowledge of how to put a novel together that rises above many other attempting the writing task. When a reviewer reads as many books as I do, it is not difficult to separate the not-so-good authors from those who really know what they are doing. I read lots of different kinds of books but I am always delighted to return to historical romance, the genre that got me reading voraciously in the first place. And without a doubt, this is a truly fine piece of storytelling and a novel that deserves to be read and enjoyed.

I give it a rating of 4.25 out of 5.