Title: The Lady and the Highwayman
Author: Sarah M Eden
Publication: 3 September 2019
Format: Kindle ebook
Elizabeth Black is the headmistress of a girls’ school in 1860s Victorian London. She is also a well-respected author of ”silver-fork” novels, stories written both for and about the upper-class ladies of Victorian society. But by night, she writes very different kinds of stories--the Penny Dreadfuls that are all the rage among the working-class men. Under the pseudonym Charles King, Elizabeth has written about dashing heroes fighting supernatural threats, intelligent detectives solving grisly murders, and dangerous outlaws romancing helpless women. They contain all the adventure and mystery that her real life lacks.
Fletcher Walker began life as a street urchin, but is now the most successful author in the Penny Dreadful market, that is until Charles King started taking all of his readers. No one knows who King is, including Fletcher’s fellow members of the Dread Penny Society, a fraternity of authors dedicated to secretly fighting for the social and political causes of their working-class readers. The group knows King could be an asset with his obvious monetary success, or he could be the group’s undoing as King’s readership continues to cut into their profits.
Determined to find the elusive Mr. King, Fletcher approaches Miss Black. As a fellow-author, she is well-known among the high-class writers; perhaps she could be persuaded to make some inquiries as to Mr. King’s whereabouts? Elizabeth agrees to help Fletcher, if only to insure her secret identity is never discovered. What neither author anticipated was the instant attraction, even though their social positions dictate the impossibility of a relationship.
For the first time Elizabeth experiences the thrill of a cat-and-mouse adventure reminiscent of one of her own novels as she tries to throw Fletcher off her scent. But the more time they spend together, the more she loses her heart. Its upper-class against working-class, author against author where readers, reputations, and romance are all on the line.
Ramble-y Teaserish Stuff
I grabbed the fourth book in The Dread Penny Society series off of NetGalley and, of course, decided that I had to backtrack to the beginning and I am so very glad that I did. The Dread Penny Society is a secret organization run similarly to Parliament but with a very different and very mixed membership -- and funded, primarily, with the sale of penny dreadfuls. Their goals are:
saving working children from abusive masters, feeding poor families, finding work for those searching, rescuing far too many women held against their will in places of ill repute , finding better situations for children in the most desperate of circumstances.
Yeah, I know. I still cheat at teasers. Still a pirate. Still break rules. Deal with it.
If you so desire, you can consider the extra blip to be penance for having both of my main blips for the day occurring before even hitting the 10% mark. It just didn't seem fair to give the background intro to the hero without doing the same for the heroine.
Believe me, there is soooooo much more that I wanted to share. The story of Fletcher and Elizabeth is an absolute delight -- as is the fact that it is enhanced with snippets from the stories that they have written for their own penny dreadfuls. I almost always complain when a book talks about a fictional piece of fiction that I long to get my hands on and read. Sarah M Eden has taken care of at least part of the frustration here and I am very thankful to her for that. I have yet to finish the book so I don't know yet if I'll be finishing all three or not -- Sarah's, Fletcher's, and "Mr. King's", but I am still thankful for what I have gotten so far.
The fourth in the series is being released in early September so expect quite a bit of Dread Penny between now and then. I'm already mourning the end of the series that I have just started to read. Luckily, Goodreads lists "75 distinct works" for Eden so I may be okay...
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"Teaser Tuesday" at The Purple Booker asks for a random line or two from anywhere in the book currently being read.
