The Earl Not Taken by A S Fenichel

Though I do like a tense thriller or mystery murder, I think this kind of read was just what my mind needed in the midst of all the drama going on in all our lives.


This was a short romance with a twist. Four young ladies sent off to finishing school in Switzerland because they are rebels at home and their parents hope to drum some "sense and most importantly decorum" into them. Plainly to accept marriage as their main goal in life and preferably to someone in the aristocracy, the higher the better. When one of them accepts and marries someone who turns out to be a bounder and a abuser which of course remains hidden until his thank god death in a hunting accident, the others are determined to vet thoroughly any future suitors for any of their hands.


This is the story of the intricacies of vetting someone whose past is determinedly hidden. He does not want it to be found for very valid reasons which the girls cannot fathom. At the same time love and attraction finds its way to the heart of one of the girls who is determined not to marry at all. How all these balance out is told in this delightful period romance.


Not soppy, yet very good reading.


Sent for an honest review by Netgalley, courtesy of Kensington Books.