The Princess Plan By Julia London #Review
*I received a eARC of this for my honest review*
The Princess Plan
London, Julia
FICTION/Romance/Historical/Victorian
Mass Market | HQN Books | A Royal Wedding
On Sale: 11/19/2019
9781335041531
$7.99
$10.99 CAN
SUMMARY:
Princes have pomp and glory—not murdered secretaries and crushes on commoners
Nothing gets London's high society's tongues wagging like a good scandal. And when the personal secretary of the visiting Prince Sebastian of Alucia is found murdered, it's all anyone can talk about, including Eliza Tricklebank. Her unapologetic gossip gazette has benefitted from an anonymous tip about the crime, prompting Sebastian to take an interest in playing detective—and an even greater one in Eliza.
With a trade deal on the line and mounting pressure to secure a noble bride, there's nothing more salacious than a prince dallying with a commoner. Sebastian finds Eliza's contrary manner as frustrating as it is seductive, but they'll have to work together if they're going to catch the culprit. And when things heat up behind closed doors, it's the prince who'll have to decide what comes first—his country or his heart.
EXCERPT:
CHAPTER
ONE
London 1845
All of London has
been on tenterhooks, desperate for a glimpse of Crown Prince
Sebastian of Alucia during his highly anticipated visit. Windsor
Castle was the scene of Her Majesty’s banquet to welcome him.
Sixty-and-one-hundred guests were on hand, feted in St. George’s
Hall beneath the various crests of the Order of the Garter. Two
thousand pieces of silver cutlery were used, one thousand crystal
glasses and goblets. The first course and main dish of lamb and
potatoes were served on silver-gilded plates, followed by delicate
fruits on French porcelain.
Prince Sebastian
presented a large urn fashioned of green Alucian malachite to our
Queen Victoria as a gift from his father the King of Alucia. The urn
was festooned with delicate ropes of gold around the mouth and the
neck.
The Alucian women
were attired in dresses of heavy silk worn close to the body, the
trains quite long and brought up and fastened with buttons to
facilitate walking. Their hair was fashioned into elaborate knots
worn at the nape. The Alucian gentlemen wore formal frock coats of
black superfine wool that came to midcalf, as well as heavily
embroidered waistcoats worn to the hip. It was reported that Crown
Prince Sebastian is “rather tall and broad, with a square face and
neatly trimmed beard, a full head of hair the color of tea, and eyes
the color of moss,” which the discerning reader might think of as a
softer shade of green. It is said he possesses a regal air owing
chiefly to the many medallions and ribbons he wore befitting his
rank.
Honeycutt’s
Gazette of Fashion and Domesticity for Ladies
The Right Honorable
Justice William Tricklebank, a widower and justice of the Queen’s
Bench in Her Majesty’s service, was very nearly blind, his eyesight
having steadily eroded into varying and fuzzy shades of gray with
age. He could no longer see so much as his hand, which was why his
eldest daughter, Miss Eliza Tricklebank, read his papers to him.
Eliza had enlisted the
help of Poppy, their housemaid, who was more family than servant,
having come to them as an orphaned girl more than twenty years ago.
Together, the two of them had anchored strings and ribbons halfway up
the walls of his London townhome, and all the judge had to do was
follow them with his hand to move from room to room. Among the
hazards he faced was a pair of dogs that were far too enthusiastic in
their wish to be of some use to him, and a cat who apparently wished
him dead, judging by the number of times he put himself in the
judge’s path, or leapt into his lap as he sat, or walked across the
knitting the judge liked to do while his daughter read to him, or
unravelled his ball of yarn without the judge’s notice.
The only other
potential impediments to his health were his daughters—Eliza, a
spinster, and her younger sister, Hollis, otherwise known as the
Widow Honeycutt. They were often together in his home, and when they
were, it seemed to him there was quite a lot of laughing at this and
shrieking at that. His daughters disputed that they shrieked, and
accused him of being old and easily startled. But the judge’s
hearing, unlike his eyesight, was quite acute, and those two shrieked
with laughter. Often.
At eight-and-twenty,
Eliza was unmarried, a fact that had long baffled the judge. There
had been an unfortunate and rather infamous misunderstanding with one
Mr. Asher Daughton-Cress, who the judge believed was despicable, but
that had been ten years ago. Eliza had once been demure and a
politely deferential young lady, but she’d shed any pretense of
deference when her heart was broken. In the last few years she had
emerged vibrant and carefree. He would think such demeanour would
recommend her to gentlemen far and wide, but apparently it did not.
She’d had only one suitor since her very public scandal, a
gentleman some fifteen years older than Eliza. Mr. Norris had
faithfully called every day until one day he did not. When the judge
had inquired, Eliza had said, “It was not love that compelled him,
Pappa. I prefer my life here with you—the work is more agreeable,
and I suspect not as many hours as marriage to him would require.”
His youngest, Hollis,
had been tragically widowed after only two years of a marriage
without issue. While she maintained her own home, she and her
delightful wit were a faithful caller to his house at least once a
day without fail, and sometimes as much as two or three times per
day. He should like to see her remarried, but Hollis insisted she was
in no rush to do so. The judge thought she rather preferred her
sister’s company to that of a man.
His daughters were
thick as thieves, as the saying went, and were coconspirators in
something that the judge did not altogether approve of. But he was
blind, and they were determined to do what they pleased no matter
what he said, so he’d given up trying to talk any practical sense
into them.
That questionable
activity was the publication of a ladies’ gazette. Tricklebank
didn’t think ladies needed a gazette, much less one having to do
with frivolous subjects such as fashion, gossip and beauty. But say
what he might, his daughters turned a deaf ear to him. They were
unfettered in their enthusiasm for this endeavour, and if the two of
them could be believed, so was all of London.
The gazette had been
established by Hollis’s husband, Sir Percival Honeycutt. Except
that Sir Percival had published an entirely different sort of
gazette, obviously— one devoted to the latest political and
financial news. Now that was a useful publication to the
judge’s way of thinking.
Sir Percival’s death
was the most tragic of accidents, the result of his carriage sliding
off the road into a swollen river during a rain, which also saw the
loss of a fine pair of grays. It was a great shock to them all, and
the judge had worried about Hollis and her ability to cope with such
a loss. But Hollis proved herself an indomitable spirit, and she had
turned her grief into efforts to preserve her husband’s name. But
as she was a young woman without a man’s education, and could not
possibly comprehend the intricacies of politics or financial matters,
she had turned the gazette on its head and dedicated it solely to
topics that interested women, which naturally would be limited to the
latest fashions and the most tantalizing on dits swirling about
London’s high society. It was the judge’s impression that women
had very little interest in the important matters of the world.
And yet,
interestingly, the judge could not deny that Hollis’s version of
the gazette was more actively sought than her husband’s had ever
been. So much so that Eliza had been pressed into the service of
helping her sister prepare her gazette each week. It was curious to
Tricklebank that so many members of the Quality were rather desperate
to be mentioned among the gazette’s pages.
Today, his daughters
were in an unusually high state of excitement, for they had secured
the highly sought-after invitations to the Duke of Marlborough’s
masquerade ball in honor of the crown prince of Alucia. One would
think the world had stopped spinning on its axis and that the heavens
had parted and the seas had receded and this veritable God of All
Royal Princes had shined his countenance upon London and blessed them
all with his presence.
Hogwash.
Everyone
knew the prince was here to strike an important trade deal with the
English government in the name of King Karl. Alucia was a small
European nation with impressive wealth for her size. It was perhaps
best known for an ongoing dispute with the neighboring country of
Wesloria—the two had a history of war and distrust as fraught as
that between England and France.
The
judge had read that it was the crown prince who was pushing for
modernization in Alucia, and who was the impetus behind the proposed
trade agreement. Prince Sebastian envisioned increasing the
prosperity of Alucia by trading cotton and iron ore for manufactured
goods. But according to the judge’s daughters, that was not the
most important part of the trade negotiations. The important
part was that the prince was also in search of a marriage bargain.
“It’s
what everyone says,” Hollis had insisted to her father over supper
recently “And how is it, my dear, that everyone knows what
the prince intends?” the judge asked as he stroked the cat, Pris,
on his lap. The cat had been named Princess when the family believed
it a female. When the houseman Ben discovered that Princess was, in
fact, a male, Eliza said it was too late to change the name. So
they’d shortened it to Pris. “Did the prince send a letter?
Announce it in the Times?”
“Caro
says,” Hollis countered, as if that were quite obvious to anyone
with half a brain where she got her information. “She knows
everything about everyone, Pappa.”
“Aha.
If Caro says it, then by all means, it must be true.”
“You
must yourself admit she is rarely wrong,” Hollis had said with an
indignant sniff.
Caro,
or Lady Caroline Hawke, had been a lifelong friend to his daughters,
and had been so often underfoot in the Tricklebank house that for
many years, it seemed to the judge that he had three daughters.
Caroline
was the only sibling of Lord Beckett Hawke and was also his ward.
Long ago, a cholera outbreak had swept through London, and both
Caro’s mother and his children’s mother had succumbed. Amelia,
his wife, and Lady Hawke had been dear friends. They’d sent their
children to the Hawke summer estate when Amelia had taken ill. Lady
Hawke had insisted on caring for her friend and, well, in the end,
they were both lost.
Lord
Hawke was an up-and-coming young lord and politician, known for his
progressive ideas in the House of Lords. He was rather handsome,
Hollis said, a popular figure, and socially in high demand. Which
meant that, by association, so was his sister. She, too, was quite
comely, which made her presence all the easier to her brother’s
many friends, the judge suspected.
But
Caroline did seem to know everyone in London, and was
constantly calling on the Tricklebank household to spout the gossip
she’d gleaned in homes across Mayfair. Here was an industrious
young lady—she called on three salons a day if she called on one.
The judge supposed her brother scarcely need worry about putting food
in their cupboards, for the two of them were dining with this
four-and-twenty or that ten-and-six almost every night. It was a
wonder Caroline wasn’t a plump little peach.
Perhaps
she was. In truth, she was merely another shadow to the judge these
days.
“And
she was at Windsor and dined with the queen,” Hollis added
with superiority.
“You
mean Caro was in the same room but one hundred persons away from the
queen,” the judge suggested. He knew how these fancy suppers went.
“Well,
she was there, Pappa, and she met the Alucians, and she knows a great
deal about them now. I am quite determined to discover who the prince
intends to offer for and announce it in the gazette before anyone
else. Can you imagine? I shall be the talk of London!”
This
was precisely what Mr. Tricklebank didn’t like about the gazette.
He did not want his daughters to be the talk of London.
But
it was not the day for him to make this point, for his daughters were
restless, moving about the house with an urgency he was not
accustomed to. Today was the day of the Royal Masquerade Ball, and
the sound of crisp petticoats and silk rustled around him, and the
scent of perfume wafted into his nose when they passed. His daughters
were waiting impatiently for Lord Hawke’s brougham to come round
and fetch them. Their masks, he was given to understand, had already
arrived at the Hawke House, commissioned, Eliza had breathlessly
reported, from “Mrs. Cubison herself.”
He
did not know who Mrs. Cubison was.
And
frankly, he didn’t know how Caro had managed to finagle the
invitations to a ball at Kensington Palace for his two
daughters—for the good Lord knew the Tricklebanks did not have the
necessary connections to achieve such a feat.
He
could feel their eagerness, their anxiety in the nervous pitch of
their giggling when they spoke to each other. Even Poppy seemed
nervous. He supposed this was to be the ball by which all other balls
in the history of mankind would forever be judged, but he was quite
thankful he was too blind to attend.
When
the knock at the door came, he was startled by such squealing and
furious activity rushing by him that he could only surmise that the
brougham had arrived and the time had come to go to the ball.
Excerpted
from The
Princess Plan
by Julia London, Copyright ©
2019 by Dinah Dinwiddle. Published by HQN Books.
MY THOUGHTS
The story started off good but at some point, it went downhill and I started not even caring for the characters.
I wish i liked it more because I do usually love Julia London's books a lot but this one just didn't do it for me at all.
I give this 2 out of 5.
AUTHOR BIO:
Julia London is a NYT, USA Today and Publishers Weekly bestselling author of historical and contemporary romance. She is a six-time finalist for the RITA Award of excellence in romantic fiction, and the recipient of RT Bookclub's Best Historical Novel.
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