In Pursuit of Eliza Cynster

The pleasure of your company is requested at thewedding of Miss Eliza Cynster . . . but not until she’srescued from a daring abduction by the mostunexpected of heroes!

Brazenly kidnapped from her sister Heather’s engagement ball, Eliza Cynster is spirited north to Edinburgh.Desperate and determined to escape, she seizes uponthe first possible champion who happens along—gentleman scholar Jeremy Carling.

Villains and rescues are a far cry from Jeremy’s expertise,yet he cannot abandon a damsel in distress. But dangerlurks and hurdles abound in their race to escapethe mysterious laird, until a final confrontation on awindswept cliff reveals what their future life could hold—if both are bold enough to capture and own theunexpected love they now share. 

Another excellent Stephanie Laurens adventure with romance....or romance with adventure. 

The Firefly Dance by Sarah Addison Allen

Four novellas about growing wise and growing up.  2 were ok, 1 was weird and the last and longest was my favourite.  It was about growing up in rural southern America as told through the eyes of a girl from the time she was until she was 24.  Each chapter was a few years later than the previous.

Entertaining but without the magic of Sarah Addison Allen's full length novels.

The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister

Once a month, eight students gather in Lillian's restaurant for a cooking class. Among them is Claire, a young woman coming to terms with her new identity as a mother; Tom, a lawyer whose life has been overturned by loss; Antonia, an Italian kitchen designer adapting to life in America; and Carl and Helen, a long-married couple whose union contains surprises the rest of the class would never suspect...

The students have come to learn the art behind Lillian's soulful dishes, but it soon becomes clear that each seeks a recipe for something beyond the kitchen. And soon they are transformed by the aromas, flavors, and textures of what they create. 

A quiet, gentle, delicious read.

The character I could most relate to was Lillian's mother, who got lost in books. 

A Hundred Small Lessons by Ashley Hay

When Elsie Gormley falls and is forced to leave her Brisbane home of sixty-two years, Lucy Kiss and her family move in, with their new life - new house, new city, new baby. Lucy and her husband Ben are struggling to transform from adventurous lovers to new parents and seek to smooth the rough edges of their present with memories of their past as they try to discover their future selves.

In her nearby nursing home, Elsie revisits the span of her life - the moments she can't bear to let go; the haunts to which she might yet return. Her memories of marriage, motherhood, love and death are intertwined with her old house, whose rooms seem to breathe Elsie's secrets into Lucy.

This  is a story of mothers and daughters, of expectations and the misunderstandings that drive them apart. And of fathers who suddenly realize everything has changed and that a child can turn their life upside down with love.

It is a quiet, touching story.

I loved the cover on this book.  It would be one of the prettiest I have seen. and it felt nice to hold.  

The Man From Beijing. by Henning Mankell

n a sleepy hamlet in north Sweden, the local police make a chilling discovery; nineteen people have been brutally slaughtered. It is a crime unprecedented in Sweden's history and the police are under incredible pressure to solve the killings.

When Judge Birgitta Roslin reads about the massacre, she realises that she has a family connection to one of the couples involved and decides to investigate. When the police make a hasty arrest it is left to her to investigate the source of a nineteenth century diary and red silk ribbon found near the crime scene. What she will uncover leads her into an international web of corruption and a story of vengeance that stretches back over a hundred years.

This book started out really well.  Interesting mystery, great twist to a diary and letters from 130 years before, believable characters.  Then it got into politics in China and lost me for a while. A satisfying ending.  The bad guys died and the heroine's marriage is getting back to being good after a bump in the road.  

I will be looking for more books by this author.

Oh Dear Silvia by Dawn French

Everyone knows the real Silvia, don't they?

Silvia Shute lies in hospital in a coma. Family and friends gather at her bedside, each thinking they know the real Silvia. But do they? For Silvia hides a secret. One she can never tell. And as her visitors congregate so the truth about Silvia is slowly revealed. Again, and again and again . . . 

 I enjoyed the way that the various characters revealed information about Silvia a bit at a time, as well as what each character unwittingly revealed about themselves in the telling. I found myself constantly changing how I felt about the characters, which sucked me right into the whole thing.   It was an intriguing story that more and more twisted as it went on.

The Chocolate Promise by Josephine Moon

Christmas Livingstone has ten rules for happiness, the most important of which is 'absolutely no romantic relationships'.

In The Chocolate Apothecary, her enchanting artisan store in Tasmania, she tempers chocolate and creates handmade delicacies. Surrounded by gifts for the senses, in this shop chocolate isn't just good for you, it's medicine.

And then one day a stranger arrives at her front door - a dishevelled botanist seeking her help. She really doesn't need Lincoln van Luc to walk into her life, even if he does have the nicest blue eyes, the loveliest meddling grandmother and a gorgeous newly rescued dog. She really doesn't need any of it. Or does she?

Set across Tasmania, Paris and Provence, this is a glorious novel of a creative woman about to find out how far in life a list of rules will take her, with an enticing tangle of freshly picked herbs, pots of flowers and lashings of chocolate scenting the air. 

Chocolate helps in all situations and forms the backdrop of this story. The parts in Tasmania are exactly right.  I would LOVE to find a chocolate shop like this one.

I did want to shake the main characters at times and tell them to talk to each other.  

A sweet, light read. 

A Sudden Fearful Death by Anne Perry

Death might be commonplace in 1857 in the Royal Free Hospital in London's Gray's Inn Road, but murder certainly isn't. When the body of Prudence Barrymore, a gently bred, dedicated and passionate nurse, is discovered stuffed into a laundry chute no one - high born or low - can be beyond suspicion. But the police seem determined to concentrate their efforts on proving Dr Kristian Beck the culprit - because he is foreign. Concerned and unhappy with this state of affairs, Lady Callandra Daviot of the Board of Governers asks Investigator William Monk to pursue the case.Monk, frustrated by the lingering traces of amnesia caused by an accident, agrees, and calls upon his old colleagues to aid him. Hester Latterly, an independent young woman who served with Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War, knew the dead woman there; Hester's profession provides the perfect cover for her to obtain work at the Royal Free. And Oliver Rathbone, a brilliant barrister, who is brought in as counsel for the defence. But under the ever-present shadow of the gallows, and inching towards the appalling solution, the three begin to despair of justice ever prevailing.

The big reveal of whodunit is left until the last few pages, though it was possible to work out why before the end.

An entertaining read. The setting in Victorian England was very well done.