A HIGHLY COURAGEOUS ADVENTURE: A Regency Cozy (Flora Hyde-Clare #2)

A HIGHLY COURAGEOUS ADVENTURE: A Regency Cozy (Flora Hyde-Clare #2)
LYNN MESSINA
Potatoworks Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Flora Hyde-Clare’s visit to her beau’s ancestral home was always going to be a disaster. Her mother’s nervous habit of rambling nonsensically, her father’s thinly veiled contempt, her own desperate desire to make a good impression on Sebastian Holcroft’s parents, and his seemingly endless parade of siblings all guaranteed that their stay in the country would be intolerably awkward at best.

Yet for all her dire misgivings, Flora never imagined one of the household servants would wind up slain in his own bed.

But that is precisely what happens to the handsome young land steward. Chock-full of bright ideas for the estate’s future, Adrian Singleton nevertheless failed to conceive the folly of dallying with an impoverished widow whom he had no intention of marrying. Tired of his lies, his lover strangles him to death with her scarf—her very stylish scarf.

That is the story everyone believes—except Flora, who simply cannot fathom how a poor woman buried in the country would get her hands on a scarf in the first stare of fashion. The lovely accessory has to belong to a lady of means, and although she knows investigating Holcroft’s sisters for murder is a surefire way to end their relationship, she simply cannot smother her suspicions. She has to poke around until she finds out which one is the culprit.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Flora (cousin of the Duchess of Kesgrave from Author Messina's related series) returns to delight us with her shrewd, witty observations...this time she's really in the muck with Sebastian, her beloved, throwing her to the piggy, pursey-mouthed swine he's related to. It's a wise move on his part, since she can never claim that she was blindsided by how perfectly ghastly and terrible his (large!) family is...snobbish, unkind, small-minded, ungrateful people, so one wonders where the heck he came from. He doesn't tell her this, leaving her to think he wants his family to approve of her...and that leads her to make more efforts to be kind than I thought she should have made! Sebastian's truly terrible father, and one of his sisters, think quite poorly of Flora despite her being cousin of a duchess...because they imagine her to be a spy. (To be fair, there's a reason for that...her behavior's odd.)

What makes the read fun is the way Author Messina lets us in on Flora's thoughts, those sensible and focused as well as those anxious and silly. I think her fondness for Sebastian is drawn with enough detail to convince all but the most cynical that she's genuinely his friend, and he hers. It's a lovely read, and the murder...despite the fact I do not enjoy murder victims being characters who really just need killin'...is handled with the aplomb of an experienced craft worker in the field.

Good fun to be had if you need some cozy escape time from modern reality.