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Sir Philip
Sommerville has annoyed all the other owners of The Poor Relation
by bringing the fat, vulgar Mrs. Budge to stay there. This
is, if you have read the other three books, that unique hotel
where the owners are all members of the aristocracy or gentry
who have fallen on hard times. The greedy woman does nothing
to earn her keep unlike the others and so she has to go -
but who is going to get rid of her, and how? Meanwhile a certain
Lady Carruthers has come to stay at the hotel bringing her
daughter with her. Arabella is kept in schoolgirl clothes
with her hair down while her mother imagines erroneously that
she looks too young to have a nineteen-year-old daughter.…
This is the fourth book in another very enjoyable Regency
sextet by M C Beaton. Wisely, she realized nobody could outdo
the late, great Georgette Heyer and so instead, she has written
books like this, full of fun and genuine humor. Like Ms. Heyer,
she has also done plenty of research into the period and it
shows, although not in an infodump way and truly I cannot
think of a more enjoyable way to learn about this period.
Don't expect a bodice ripper either, but a colorful romp where
each book tells of the next set of adventures (or misadventures)
in the lives of the hotels owners. As well as a separate story,
there are the ongoing threads to pick up each time, and all
this is squeezed into a remarkably modest number of pages.
If you like your romances bright and breezy, you ought to
love this series.
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