The Setting 19th century England (1840s). She’s a survivor, so her impregnable fortress of bitterness is understandable, but becomes tiresome.

The Heroine Live-by-her-wits journalist and living-under-assumed-identity/ies expert Lisette Colburne, prime suspect in a murder that happens in another book in the series. He’s patient with human frailty and weakness in spite of having made his living as a crimestopper and prosecutor. The Hero Ruthless police commissioner Royden Napier, known in his line of work as Roughshod Roy, he proves disarmingly and appealingly open, self-aware, and compassionate. To help organize my thoughts, sometimes I just start with the basics: And “meh” reviews are always the hardest to write. I’ve been trying to write this “review” post for weeks now and I think I’m stuck because it was somehow both predictable and confusing. I’m not an “auto-buy” kind of consumer, but I’ve kept up, and this winter I found a copy of her recent A Bride By Moonlight at my local used paperback shop. I fell easily into this Regency world, which has more of Chase than of Laurens, is angsty in the right ways, and is populated by memorable characters who pop up across her overlapping series. (In case anyone’s wondering, this is the phase when I also read about 29 versions of the same book by Stephanie Laurens.) Sometime during this phase I picked up a copy of Carlyle’s My False Heart because of its (then) unusual cover and was utterly charmed by its unusual blend of smoldering romance, good conversation, artsy ambience, and eccentric domestic goings-on. Hectic, exhausting days, but kids in bed early and evenings to myself for second shift chores, or ignoring the laundry, binge-watching episodes of Sharpe, and reading. The novels of Liz Carlyle fall into the post-Outlander, pre-JoBev, very Black Dagger Brotherhood phase when I was parenting twin preschoolers and basically stuck at home (or the playground) with them whenever we weren’t at daycare and the office, respectively. Maybe one of these days I’m going to plot it out on some kind of timeline, or “family” tree of subgenres and series. There are many moods and phases meandering across the chronology of my years as a faithful romance reader. In which I revisit a favorite author, try to review a recent book ( A Bride By Moonlight ), and get tripped up by complications and connections

My false heart by liz carlyle