Synopsis
How much would you pay for a clear conscience?
Adelaide Leeson wants to prove herself worthy of her husband, a man of noble aspirations who married her when she was at her lowest ebb.
Lord Tristan Leeson is a model of diplomacy and self-control, even curbing the fiery impulses of his youth to maintain the calm relations deemed essential by his mother-in-law to preserve his wife’s health.
A visit from his boyhood friend, feted poet Lord James Dewhurst, author of the sensational Maid of Milan, persuades Tristan that leaving the countryside behind for the London Season will be in everyone’s interests.
But as Tristan’s political career rises and Adelaide revels in society’s adulation, the secrets of the past are uncovered. And there’s a high price to pay for a life of deception.
Beverley Eikli
Beverley Eikli wrote her first romance when she was seventeen. However, drowning the heroine on the last page was, she discovered, not in the spirit of the genre so her romance-writing career ground to a halt and she became a journalist.
After throwing in her secure job on South Australia’s metropolitan daily, The Advertiser, to manage a luxury safari lodge in the Okavango Delta, in Botswana, Beverley discovered a new world of romance and adventure in a thatched cottage in the middle of a mopane forest with the handsome Norwegian bush pilot she met around a camp fire.
Eighteen years later, after exploring the world in the back of Cessna 404s and CASA 212s as an airborne geophysical survey operator during low-level sorties over the French Guyanese jungle and Greenland’s ice cap, Beverley is back in Australia living a more conventional life with her husband and two daughters in a pretty country town an hour north of Melbourne.
Beverly won Choc Lit’s Search for an Australian Star with The Reluctant Bride. Beverley’s Choc Lit novels include: The Reluctant Bride and The Maid of Milan.
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Book Trailer
Beverley’s Book Trailer:
Reviewed by Leslie at InD’Tale Magazine.
Read the full review here…
This book was more than a surprise for me. I will be honest and say i completely misjudged the book and put it to the bottom of my TBR list however, i am happy to admit that it was nothing like i expected it to be.
The twists and turns had me thinking long after i put my kindle down. I haven’t read a book from this author before but have already bought and started another.
The setting was perfect – to me anyway, I love being set a scene that i can imagine in my own head, a scene that my mind usually runs away with and decides what will happen next, however Beverley Eikli surprised me every time and i soon realised it was pointless to think ahead as i was always wrong..
I felt for Adelaide, her struggles, being pulled in directions she couldn’t fully control and being suffocated by those around her was emotional to read. It read like a true account of situations that people had lived, i understood and symapthised, i felt anger and frustration on her behalf and then had tears for her at the end. The characters were well rounded, with well thought out backgrounds with their own intricate webs carefully set out, developed and concluded to satisfaction. This is definitely a book i would recommend to my friends and book club..
This was simply a brilliant book by a fantastic author whom i cant wait to read more off.
I have to be honest, when I got this book I thought it was going to be another fluffy Regency bodice ripper romance with some rake in mole skin trousers. Was I wrong! This book is nothing like you would expect. The only way I can describe it, is as a Regency version of Dynasty. It has everything, secrets, lies, blackmail, love triangles, death, drug addiction, jealousy, affairs, scandals, oh and some bodice ripping too- the only thing it is missing is Joan Collins. However, I think Mrs. Henley, Adelaide’s mother runs a close second.
Mrs. Henley forces Adelaide to go along with the story that she created in order to save Adelaide, but all it does is eats her away from the inside. She is later put in a position that the only way to get out of one lie is to tell more.
No one is who they seem in this book, except for Tristan. Tristan is truly honourable man with a moral compass who repeatedly saves Adelaide.
Adelaide’s only real crime is being young and in love and obeying her mother. Time after time, her loyalty to her mother and her husband are tested. In the end, you learn who the true villain is and why.
The book has a genteel opulence of Anthony Trollope’s The Palliser’s but underneath the waving fans it is all gritty intrigue.
This is the first book I read by Beverley Eikli and I can say I am now a fan.
The Maid of Milan gripped me from the start and kept me there. I read it in a day, I just couldn’t put it down. I highly recommend this unique book.