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Steward and land agent
Matthew Rowsley has his work cut out for him, managing the
neglected estate of the young and rakish Lord Croft. Things
get even busier when first young maid Maggie disappears, and
then so does his lordship. With the help of attractive housekeeper
Mrs. Faulkner, he starts to investigate, and finds that there
is a lot more going on than he thought.
We
aren’t given a date, but judging by mentions of both
bonnets and trains, I would place it around the middle of
the 19th century. Rowsley is an easy man to like with his
progressive and humanitarian views, nurtured by his equally
forward-thinking family. He makes for a good narrator, and
a lot of this novel will be of interest to anybody curious
about the workings of a great estate at this time. His job
entails managing everybody and keeping track of all the work
and repairs as well as keeping an eye on what the staff are
up to. This is clearly not a happy house, and these are definitely
the bad old days with some very feudal attitudes to servants
and the poor on the part of the aristocracy. There are many
very good and very bad people in this book with not a lot
in the middle, but it certainly gets its point home about
conditions back then. The pace could have done with livening
up, and the plot moves at rather a glacial speed as a plot
breadcrumb at a time is revealed leading up to the conclusion,
which is not hard to work out. This is not so much a mystery
as a straight historical novel with mystery and even romantic
elements, and I did enjoy reading about the workings of the
estate. At the end of the book (I read the ebook) is the first
few pages of the second entry in this new series, and as I
have read and enjoyed other books by this author, I will be
intrigued to see what happens next.
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