Death at Dawn
Liberty Lane has been brought up to believe in liberty, fraternity and equality by her freethinking father, but it seems to have brought him to a sad end. After he is shot while fighting a duel in Calais, it is the sad duty of Liberty to escape from her frosty aunt and cross the channel to see him buried. But Thomas abhorred the very idea of fighting duels, and his final letter sounded as though he was mixed up in some very odd business.
I have always enjoyed historical adventures, and this one with its lively heroine, sinister spies, plots concerning folk in high places and general skulduggery is right up my dark alley. It is a fun read, narrated by Liberty, and delightfully colourful. You might also expect it to be fast-paced but it does not hurtle along, rather stopping for observations and some quite tactile descriptions. Rather to its detriment it gets a little breathless towards the end in the manner of a vehicle with faulty brakes going down a hill. When the last page is turned there are rather more questions than answers, which I guess is supposed to whet the reader’s appetite for more; I would have preferred a better finish.
