A WRETCHED FOLLY: A Regency Cozy, FOURTEENTH in Bea's series of stories

A WRETCHED FOLLY: A Regency Cozy (Beatrice Hyde-Clare #14)
LYNN MESSINA
Potatoworks Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Traveling to the ancestral Matlock estate with her husband, Beatrice, Duchess of Kesgrave, is finally able to confront her greatest the pinery. Forced to endure an endless parade of pineapple-inflected dishes early in her marriage, she has devised a scheme to sabotage the despised fruit, which she can now carry out at long last.

Good gracious, no. Bea does not really mean the plants any harm, and approaching the building on a summer morning, she is struck by how lovely it is, with its elegant portico and high arching windows. It is a shame, then, that she stumbles across a slain corpse almost immediately upon entering.

Devil it! A dead body is the last thing she wants to contend with! She’s in the country — nearly a hundred miles from London and her recent harrowing experience. Having proven to the beau monde that she is not guilty of multiple homicides, she is eager to put some distance between her and her reputation as the murder duchess. All she wants to do is enjoy some fresh air and ingratiate herself with her new staff, an effort that would not be aided by accusing the servants of lying — although they obviously are, which the constable will figure out quickly enough if he is not a dunderhead.

Oh, but maybe he is a dunderhead and maybe the drawing in the victim’s pocket actually is a treasure map to a lost viking horde and maybe the murder duchess is a little too set in her ways to allow a killer to go free — or strike again.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Duke and soon-to-be father Damien has brought his duchess Beatrice to his ancestral estate for her confinement. Haverill Hall is also the source of Bea's culinary nemesis, the pineapple, a very very expensive and trendy comestible she loathes. There are, in her thoughts at least, opportunities to create that will end the beloathèd plants from existing while looking innocent of wrongdoing in her belovèd Duke's eyes.

Be real, Bea: he'd know anyway if something destroyed his pineapples in their pinery. Plus you've got bigger fish to fry. Like, why's there a dead guy in said pinery. Like, when's this baby coming. Like, what now when the pinery turns out to be cozy and charming. Not least, like who are all these people in Haverhill?

Damien, still furious about the ton's recent treatment of the woman he adores, is not blind to Bea's character. He doesn't love her anyway, he loves her as she is. It makes Duke Damien my hero. I really need to get stories about men who love and support their partners; his silly childish endearments would irk me were they not overmatched by his fondness and demonstrable care for her. It does, however, still cause him great anxiety that his Bea is suddenly wrapped up in another murder solving, only now while she is at the point of delivering her husband's much-desired heir. It's clear this is very much the motivation for how...helpful...everyone, from Kesgrave the slightly pedantic and overintellectual Duke to the staff are to Bea as she clearly has no smallest desire to be inactive and uninvolved in the world. The wretched, boring novel she's agreed to read instead of dashing about but that can't even make her fall asleep it's so pathetic, honestly sounds very like late-pregnancy frustration and severe tedium intolerance. She's not in London, she's got a murder of someone she is not interested in that she's mostly happy to let the constable deal with until she frankly gets involved mostly to keep herself from going mad.

When the corpse's identity becomes clear, it still feels like Bea is not really invested in solving his murder, but in working through some feelings she's got left over from events in Flora's A Highly Courageous Adventure (what a family her cousin is marrying into! unlike her husband, he's chock-a-block with terrible relatives) and Verity's A Lark's Regret (apologies matter, when harm's been done however careless instead of malicious it was). It was, if I'm honest, a matter of deepest indifference to me who killed the lazy, greedy git. Still and all Ma'at must be served or there is no point in promulgating a concept of justice. I'm not salty about the absence of same in the 21st century at all, nonsense whatever might you mean.

I don't at all recommend starting here because there are spoilers for multiple books in these series of intertwined Regencies. Begin at the beginning. Get these relationship-driven crime-solving stories in their proper order so you won't slap your forehead and/or purse your lips in annoyance like I did multiple times.

I'm giving four full stars, despite my deep conviction neither Bea nor I care in the least about this jerk's murder (and I suspect we're both eager to attend Mrs. Pomphrey's wake, sour old baggage she is) because Damien, Duke of Kesgrave, and his Duchess Beatrice, are so very obviously partners in what they both treasure as a friendship. That makes me feel hopeful and happy, so is worth four stars on the strength of that alone.

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.