Overall: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ 
Plot/Storyline: 📖📖📖📖 
Feels: 🦋🦋 
Emotional Depth: 💔💔💔 
Sexual Tension: ⚡⚡ 
Romance: 💞💞💞 
Sensuality: 💋💋 
Sex Scene Length: 🍑🍑  
Steam Scale (Number of Sex Scenes): 🔥🔥 (I listened to the audiobook and usually the scenes feel a bit shorter to me on audio than written – but these felt extremely short. It’s hard to for me to judge the length without having it black and white on the page :) ) 
Humor: Yes! Some lovely humor and dialogue that had me smirking.

Should I read in order? 
I would say yes – I read the second book in the series (and I found myself wishing I had read book 1) and now that it’s been awhile I found myself kind of lost in the beginning. There was a lot of information dumping and people talked about – this may come as redundant if you’ve recently read the whole series, but as it was I was wishing I read read this one sooner after finishing book 2. The Princess Plan starts off the series.

Basic plot:
Hollis has been a widow for 3 years and poured her efforts into Lady Honeycutt’s Gazette, which features fashion and gossip, though she’d love to have it take a more serious investigative theme. It seems her family and friends are all married and she is becoming ‘that relative’. Marek is in London visiting with others from Wesloria. Hollis latches onto him for information and also a bit of suspicion for his purpose in town. Soon they are finding each other at every function and working together to solve a dangerous mystery.

Give this a try if you want:
- Christmas time novel
- Victorian time period (1841)
- Lower steam – There are 2 scenes but they are on the short and flowery side
- Disability featured – our hero has hearing damage on his left side and is almost completely deaf when sound comes from that side
- A focus being on working together to resolve a problem in the story (kind of a mystery?)
- Lots of family members love – there’s plenty of scenes of Hollis with her family, including characters from the prior books and being and aunt to their children

My thoughts:
I struggled with this story. I had the same issues that I had with book 2, though they seemed more pronounced in this one (or it could be my issues with focusing now that I didn’t have a few years ago)

The characters really were lovely. Especially Hollis. I just adored her. She was this ball of sunshine and never let anyone get her down. She was happy, spunky, stubborn, but she used the most adorables ploys to get what she wanted. She cajoled and bribed and said the right things. She was just a pure delight to read, really. 

Marek it look much, much longer to get to know. He was very private and standoffish with Hollis, trying to avoid her through the first half the of book. But when he does realize he’s falling, it was beautiful. I adored the ending and his declarations were so romantic to me.  I had no qualms that these two were going to make it long term.

But – it took FOREVER for me to get to this point. The beginning I was so bogged down in details it was just too much. I started to be overwhelmed with the plot, the intrigue, the back story, and all the characters and I just wanted to get through it. I kept stopping this one and picking it up again and having the same problems with it. 

It’s a fairly slow moving plot. It’s slow burn. I just found it….slow. And I don’t want to imply it’s a bad book because I do think this was totally me struggling to connect – but I ended up only really enjoying maybe about 15% of the book. 

It was funny! There were a lot of super adorable, cute, and utterly sweet family moments and humor and that was just lovely. 

I am thinking I wouldn’t try anything else from this series (I don’t know if that was the end of it, but I don’t plan on reading book 1). This is all I have tried from London so I will have to go back and try some of her older work sometime.

Content Warnings:

poisoning
treasonous plots
death of a spouse remembered

Locations of kisses/intimate scenes:

70% - kiss
74% - brief kiss
78% - kisses, light breast play, missionary sex (on the short side)
86% - sex – quite short