Lady Maggie’s Secret Scandal by Grace Burrowes

Narrated by James Langton

Lady Maggie’s Secret Scandal is the fifth full-length novel in Grace Burrowes’ series about the eight Windham siblings; the three sons and five daughters of the Duke and Duchess of Moreland. Like Devlin St. Just (The Soldier), Magdalen – Maggie – Windham is illegitimate, fathered by the duke before his marriage, but welcomed into the family as a child, brought up alongside the ducal couple’s legitimate children and later legally adopted.

Now aged thirty, Maggie maintains her own small establishment and is a wealthy woman in her own right, having discovered a talent for investing and speculation when she was in her teens. She regularly advises her brother, the Earl of Westhaven (The Heir) on financial matters, but in general keeps very much to herself, not one for socialising or regular outings. She is unmarried and likely to remain so given her reclusive tendencies, and it’s no secret that the Duchess worries about Maggie and her happiness as much as she does her own daughters.

When Maggie’s favourite reticule suddenly goes missing, her worry is so disproportionate to the value of the lost item that it’s immediately apparent that she has lost much more than a simple purse. When days go by and she has looked everywhere it could possibly be without finding it, there’s only one thing for it and reluctantly, she turns to Benjamin Hazlit for help. Hazlit is an investigator, very good at solving problems and digging up society dirt when required – and is frequently employed by the Windham family, which is how Maggie is acquainted with him. She doesn’t like what he does for a living, but she knows that his discretion is assured and asks him to locate her missing reticule. Being a very shrewd man, Hazlit is well aware that there is something – or a lot of somethings – that Miss Windham (she dislikes her courtesy title of ‘Lady’) isn’t telling him; and at first declines her commission, even though he senses that whatever her secrets are, they’re seriously preying on her mind. But Maggie won’t take no for an answer; the longer her reticule is missing, the greater the likelihood its contents have fallen into the hands of someone up to no good – and she finds a way to persuade Mr. Hazlit to change his mind.

The mystery of the missing reticule naturally throws Maggie and Benjamin together quite a lot, and in order to prevent any damage to her reputation, he suggests that they enter upon a fake engagement which they can quietly call off at a later date. Maggie isn’t thrilled at the idea, yet sees the sense in it… but when the attraction that has been sparking between them from the beginning begins to deepen into something much stronger, Maggie knows she’s in trouble and wants to call it off. She’s always insisted she does not want to marry and, at thirty, believes her spinsterhood is assured, but Benjamin is making her feel and want things she’d never thought to feel or want; he’s attentive, constant, and seductive… and his obvious desire for her is increasingly hard to resist.

It’s difficult to say much more about the plot without spoiiers, but even though I enjoyed the listen overall, there are a number of inconsistencies throughout that threatened to take me out of the story. I am a fan of the author, but while she is an incredibly good writer of relationships – whether romantic, friendship or familial – and offers her readers a terrific insight into the inner lives of her characters and their motivations, many of her love stories hit a snag when it comes to the conflict that is needed to create some kind of tension or provide obstacles for the central couple to overcome. Here, it’s obvious – given the book’s title – that Maggie is keeping a big secret, and that she doesn’t want to let anyone in on it. When the truth is revealed, her reasons are fairly sound; although they might seem a bit flimsy to a modern audience, they make sense for the time in which the book is set, when reputations were currency among the upper classes – and also speak to the depth of the love Maggie has for her family. But the problem I had was with the fact that Maggie needed help to find out what had happened to her reticule, but refused to tell Ben exactly WHY it was so important to her. At the beginning of the book, she makes it clear she dislikes his profession and because she believes he’s a snoop and violates people’s privacy – yet she makes it impossible for him to do anything OTHER than snoop by refusing to give him all the information he needs in order to find her missing property and thereby prevent an innocent person from suffering harm.

On the plus side – and it’s a big plus – the romance between Maggie and Ben is very nicely developed, sensual and laced with humour and affection. They have more in common than they think, and the moments in which they each realise how lonely they are and recognise the same thing about the other person are insightful and well done. Ben is a lovely hero – assertive, honourable and somewhat brusque, he’s good at what he does and is devoted to Maggie, very quickly seeing through her prickly exterior to the vulnerable woman underneath. I liked Maggie, too, although I found her secretiveness extremely illogical (and as irritating as Ben did!) and while we’re told she’s a financial genius, there isn’t any real evidence of it on display in this particular story.

I’ve listened to James Langton a number of times over the years and while some aspects of his narrations are problematic, I enjoy them for the most part, because he has a lovely voice and delivers an enjoyable all-round performance. He is perfectly suited to narrating Grace Burrowes’ novels because he seems to instinctually understand her flair for unusual and distinctive language; when I try to imagine another narrator reading her words, I just can’t do it, and whenever I read a book by Ms. Burrowes, it’s Mr. Langton’s voice I hear in my head. But there’s no denying that his heroine voices are not always successful, and in the last couple of narrations of his I’ve listened to, I’ve noticed that they’re somewhat inconsistent from one end of the book to the other. When I began listening to Lady Maggie, he performed her dialogue at a suitably middling pitch – not too deep, not falsetto – but as the story progresses, that pitch gradually increases, so that by the end of the book, she’s speaking several semitones higher than she was at the beginning, leaving little room for emotional inflection before getting dangerously close to soprano territory! Fortunately, it doesn’t go there, but I really wish Maggie’s dialogue had remained at the opening pitch throughout.

All the other characterisations are very good though; I like his portrayal of Percy (the duke) as a wily old fox and he differentiates well between all the other male secondary characters in the story. He gives Ben a very slight northern accent, which, while possibly not completely realistic (aristocratic gentlemen would probably have lost any regional accent at school), works nicely, and, together with his expressive delivery and warm tones, makes Ben an attractive hero.

Lady Maggie’s Secret Scandal is thus a bit of a mixed bag in terms of both content and narration, but I enjoyed it sufficiently to be able to recommend it in spite of the reservations I’ve expressed.

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Caz

AUDIOBOOK INFORMATION

TITLE: Lady Maggie’s Secret Scandal

AUTHOR: Grace Burrowes

NARRATED BY: James Langton

GENRE: Historical Romance

STEAM FACTOR: Glad I had my earbuds in

REVIEWER: Caz [button type=’link’ link=’http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M2WGX05/?tag=audiogalsnet-20′ size=’btn-lg’ variation=’btn-default’ target=’blank’]Buy Lady Maggie’s Secret Scandal by Grace Burrowes on Amazon[/button]