Rebecca Brandewyne, The Crystal Rose

The Crystal Rose

Rebecca Brandewyne

Mira, December 2006, $6.99

ISBN: 0778322963

In 1835 Delhi, India, Lord Thornleigh's haveli (home) is on fire. Young Rose Windermere watches the blaze from her window next door and worries that her best friend, thirteen year old Hugo Drayton, Thornleigh's son, will die in the inferno. Rose and her family survive the conflagration, while the Thornleigh brood, including Hugo is assumed to be dead. A sad Rose believes that her pal survived because she knows she would somehow feel a loss inside if he died. Her family returns to England soon after the fiery debacle, while Hugo lives in hiding saved by his man-servant Mayur Singh, though his parents were murdered in the fire as a cover-up.

Years later in Covent Garden, a stranger slips a letter into the hand of Rose that says very little that makes sense to her. However, when she meets an Indian businessman, Rose feels she knows him from most likely her time in the subcontinent. She goes with her gut and soon encounters Hugo alive and well, with a plan to expose his odious cousin as an avaricious murderer of his uncle and aunt in India over fifteen years ago, and now is involved in a conspiracy against the throne.

This is an exhilarating Victorian romantic suspense that grips the audience with the vivid opening sequence in which the reader sees the fire through the eyes of Rose. The storyline contains several twists afterward, though seems a bit over the edge with the unneeded threat to Queen Victoria, as Hugo has enough on his plate to prove his relative is a cold blooded killer, and to show he loves his childhood sweetheart with an adult love. Historical romance readers will enjoy Rebecca Brandewyne's fine thriller.