DAUGHTER OF THE GAME

Historical romance debut with a superabundance of plot twists and psychological turns,

In the Regency England of 1819, six-year-old Colin Fraser is stolen from his home and made the bargaining chip of a Spanish zealot named Carevelo, who believes that Colin’s father Charles, a rising young politician of means, possesses the Carevelo family ring that Carevelo needs to fight the Spanish monarchy. While the police search for Colin, Charles and his beautiful wife Mélanie look for the ring. Seven years earlier, during the French occupation of Spain, Charles had led a British expedition into the Spanish mountains to secure the piece of jewelry, but it was lost after an ambush by the French. While in the mountains, Charles met Mélanie, a young half-Spanish/half-French anti-Bonapartist noblewoman running from French soldiers who had raped her and murdered her family. Charles married Mélanie and has raised and loved Colin, the child she was carrying, as his own. But the kidnapping forces Mélanie to admit to Charles the lies that their marriage was based on: She was actually a spy, not a noblewoman, and Colin’s father was not a rapist but her spy master, Raoul O’Roarke. Coincidentally (or not), O’Roarke knew Charles years earlier and had once given him a copy of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Charles, whose liberal ideals and feminist sympathies are remarkable, to say the least, reacts to his wife’s confessions with understandable fury at first, then begins considering his own deceptions. The combination of literary allusions and psychological self-examination gets pretty thick at times. As the two close in on the ring’s mystery, Mélanie is stabbed and Charles shot: clearly, someone wants to stop their search. But Charles and Mélanie are determined to save their son, and their marriage.

A little high-minded but, in the main, thoroughly enjoyable hokum.