I think reading in French has totally screwed up my reading English skills! I don’t think I’ve ever read a book so slowly and carefully. It’s probably a good thing though. This is one of only a few of Laurie King’s books that I haven’t read. I’ve been wanting to read it for years, but it hasn’t been published in the UK before now. She has written a sequel to it recently and her UK publisher has decided to let us read this one first. Given the long delay over publication I had wondered if it would turn out to be not-so-great. It involves an American spy wandering through the English aristocracy in the 1920s, you feel it could go horribly wrong although King has done a decent job of injecting Americans into early twentieth century England before with the Russell & Holmes series. I ended up liking that series a lot after some initial misgivings. This one I liked straight away and it was well worth lingering over, I really enjoyed it, and am looking forward to reading The Bones of Paris before too long.