RATING:
4 Out Of 5
REVIEW:
Lady Madeline Essex is not ready to get married yet, even though her cousins Cecily and Juliet have both found love with their husbands. Before she even the considers the idea of matrimony, she wants to write a novel before she takes that next step. Her novel is at the center of a Gaming Hell, so she decides to go to one to get information for her novel. After brow beating her brother, he takes her to Mrs. Baily’s Gaming Hell, where she runs into her cousin’s husbands friend, Colonel Lord Christian Monteith, the new Earl of Gresham…
Christian has undertaken a mission from his former commanding officer to investigate a gamester for espionage, who happens to be a friend of Maddie’s brother. Christian is informed that they will be attending Mrs. Bailey’s he decides to attend to see what information he can gather. So when Maddie enters Mrs. Bailey’s with her brother he is not surprised since they become acquainted since his friend, Lucas Dalton the Duke of Winterson courtship with her cousin Cecily, but that doesn’t stop him from taking her aside and scolding her for being there…
When a murder takes place and Maddie happens to be the one to find the body and discovers its her brother’s friend. After her brother is found to have left Mrs Baily’s, people are suspicious that he his involved. Maddie decides to find the murderer to clear her brothers name and since Christian was going to look into it since the person he was gathering in tel about turned up murdered decides to help Maddie and protect her from trouble. Now that they are thrown together, they now face this undeniable attraction for each other that can’t be denied. And Maddie wonders if it will turn into a love that her cousins have found with their husbands…
This was a great conclusion to the “Ugly Duckling” trilogy. I really liked Christian’s character. He was honest, protective of those who he considers friends and his family, and patient, though Maddie has a way of running his patience thin. And though he disagrees with Maddie’s ideas and plans, he knows he wouldn’t be able to talk her out of it and decides to make sure he is there to protect her just in case. I like the friendship he has with Winterson and Deveril, and it was fun to see how it developed throughout the trilogy.
I liked Maddie in the first two books. And though I still liked her character, some of the things that she did didn’t seem like it was something she would of done. Like her other cousins, she has a stubborn streak when she decides to do something. But unlike Cecily and Juliet, she didn’t seem really smart on how she went about to do things, which I didn’t really notice when she was mentioned in the other two books. It just didn’t seem like it was natural, but I guess it did have story flow without holding it up or having something added that didn’t make since so in the end it worked out.
I do like how in all the books that the author had all the couples, Winterson and Cecily, Juliet and Deveril, and in the end Maddie and Christian in them which made the story fun when they were in it. I enjoyed how at the end of this book that you even read how Amelia Snow, Cecily’s, Juliet’s, and Maddie’s arch-nemesis turn a new leaf and it makes me wonder if the author has a story planned for her. And in a way I think it would be fun to see how her character grows, from this trilogy and to her own story, and to see the man that would finally sweep her off her feet. I do hope if Ms. Collins does one, that she mentions these guys in it. ;o)
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