A Baker's Dozen of Reviews: Day Seven--A Midnight Clear

A Midnight Clear

By Lynn Kerstan

Publisher: Belle Bridge Books

Release Date: March 11, 2013

(Reissue of 1997 Fawcett Regency)

Jane Ryder is desperate when she applies for and obtains a position as secretary to Lady Eudora Swann, an immensely wealthy grande dame, thanks to her having outlived six husbands. At eighty-six, Lady Swann is determined to leave something behind to ensure that she will be remembered. With this goal in mind, she is writing two books. One is a history of the British aristocracy to be printed a hundred years after Lady Swann’s death; the other, entitled Scandalbroth, is an account of the scandals that have rocked the ton during Lady Swann’s long memory, with three chapters devoted to the particularly disreputable Marquesses of Fallon.

The current Marquess of Fallon, recently returned from India where he made his fortune, is determined to restore the family’s estate which has been ruined by his father’s and grandfather’s excesses and the family name. Scandalbroth will make his task immeasurably difficult, if not impossible. Too stubborn to be persuaded and too wealthy to be bribed, Lady Swann is immune to the marquess’s pleas and threats. But she sends one offer via Jane. If Fallon will allow Jane access to the Fallon family papers and tell Jane his own story for the history, Lady Swann will consider destroying Scandalbroth unpublished.

Fallon has little confidence in Lady Swann’s promise and even less that there are any Fallon family papers, but he agrees that Jane can accompany him to his family estate, Wolvercote, while he considers what must be done to restore the place. At least, Jane will be company when he makes a visit to a place to which he is strangely reluctant to return.

Wolvercote is in deplorable condition, and the memories it holds just as unpleasant as Fallon expected. What he doesn’t expect is to fall through rotted stairs and injure himself. His injuries added to a snowstorm make a return to the inn dangerous, but Fallon refuses to shelter at Wolvercote. Instead, he and Jane make their way to the nearby dower house where his grandmother lived, the one place that holds happy childhood memories.

The snowstorm challenges the ingenuity of the two to find fuel for the fireplaces and food to eat, but both Jane and Fallon enjoy the challenge. The seclusion fosters an emotional intimacy between the mismatched pair, and they share details of their pasts that they have shared with no one else. Jane’s competence and resilience hold a strong appeal for Fallon, who is also finding her more and more attractive as they get to know one another. Jane has already lost her heart. She loses it again when their makeshift Christmas dinner is interrupted by the sound of bells and they find an infant in a basket outside the stable. Fallon has a mystery to solve that will bring him pain and joy, and Jane finds a future brighter than any she could have imagined.

I love traditional Regencies, and it was a pleasure to find a delightful one that I had not read. A wealthy marquess and a secretary who is little more than a servant seem to have nothing in common, but Jane and Fallon are both lonely people forced by circumstances to depend only on themselves and to make the most of their opportunities. Watching them become real and dear to one another and watching Lady Swann’s machinations force them into a realization of just what they have found in one another is heartwarming. The Christmas setting and the infant whose tiny hands grab both their hearts make it a special story.

If you like traditional Regencies with engaging characters or if you like historical Christmas stories with a tender romance and a generous serving of seasonal sentiment, you will enjoy this story. Once again Belle Bridge has reissued an older romance that is a true treasure. I’ll be adding A Midnight Clear to my favorite Christmas romances.

Some reissues seem dated. Some are classic stories that are timeless. I place A Midnight Clear in the latter category. What makes a story timeless for you?

Bonus Review: The Biscuit Witch

The Biscuit Witch

A Crossroads Café novella, 
Book One of The MacBrides
By Deborah Smith

Publisher: 

Belle Bridge Books

Release Date: April 30, 2013

Tallulah Bankhead MacBride is on the run. Her daughter’s father, a New York celebrity chef, is determined to stop the rumors that he has never even seen his five-year-old daughter. Tal is equally determined to protect her child from the man who is “equal parts Bully, Braggart, and All-around Self-Centered jerk.” When an altercation involving cupcakes ends in a warrant for Tal’s arrest, she and her daughter take to the road. Tal needs a sanctuary, and since her sister in California is too far away, she heads toward the place she once called home, the mountains of North Carolina, northwest of Ashville, where her cousin Delta Whittlespoon owns the Crossroads Café.

Delta is away in New York, but the eccentric population of the community proves more than a match for the hired guns the jerky chef has sent after Tal. It turns out that the Crossroads Café needs Tal as much as she needs a safe place to hide. The biscuits Delta shipped from New York have been routed wrongly, and hungry hordes of tourists are scheduled to arrive expecting to be served the world-famous biscuits. Nobody can bake biscuits to match Delta’s--nobody except Tal who, like Delta herself, is a hereditary biscuit witch who can make biscuits by the secret recipe of their common ancestress, Mary Eve Nettie, the wild woman of Wild Woman Ridge. Perhaps Tal can find a place to belong.

The staunchest defender of Tal and her daughter Eve is another beneficiary of Delta’s benevolence and willingness to extend cousinhood to the most remote family connections. Douglas Firth, a whistle-blowing veterinarian from Scotland via Florida, is the third cousin twice removed of Delta’s husband, Sheriff Pike Whittlespoon. That connection is all Delta needs to offer Douglas a place to call home and a job as vet when he is cast out of wealthy racing circles. It takes scarcely more than a second look for the red-haired biscuit whisperer and five-year-old Eve to own the heart of this Scotsman. He opens his home and the ghost town where it is located to Tal and Eve. But Douglas and Tal have stories to share, secrets to unravel, and enemies to defeat before Tal can believe in a future that includes home, family, and a love bigger than her hungry dreams.

“The Biscuit Witch” is the first of a new, three-part novel from Deborah Smith, her first since A Gentle Rain (2007). Smith takes her readers back to the world of A Crossroads Café (2006), a place where the eccentric is ordinary and where outcasts, misfits, and other assorted lost souls find healing, wholeness, and home. The point of view alternates between Tal and Douglas, a technique that expands the reader’s experience.

I loved everything about “The Biscuit Witch”—its quirky characters, its humor of word and situation, the spirit of the large-hearted Delta that saturates the scenes even in her absence, a sense of place so strong that I felt the late November chill and smelled the baking biscuits, and the lyrical prose that touched my heart like an old song from a half-remembered dream. The touch of magical realism was an added delight. According to Flannery O’Connor, “The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet.” Deborah Smith has found that crossroads, and she takes her reader there.

When I’m 103 and rocking on the porch of the local nursing home with the latest reading device filled with favorite romance novels and promising new ones in hand, I’ll still be wondering why Deborah Smith’s books aren’t on the bookshelves, print or digital, of every romance reader. Her characters, imperfect and past-haunted, are gloriously real and infinitely interesting. That description applies not only to Tal and Douglas but also to an impressive cast of secondary characters, including Tal’s sister, Gabby (Greta Garbo MacBride), the pickle queen, and her brother, Gus (Groucho Marx MacBride), the kitchen charmer, whose stories will be told in parts two and three. 

If you’ve never read Deborah Smith, “The Biscuit Witch” is a terrific introduction. The Crossroads Café, the novel in which Delta Whittlespoon first appears, is also a powerful and richly emotional tale. The digital version is on sale for $1.99 through the end of this month. I highly recommend both. And if you want more recommendations, A Place to Call Home is one of my all-time top ten favorite romances, and A Gentle Rain, Charming Grace, Sweet Hush, When Venus Fell, and On Bear Mountain all get five-star ratings from me.

Are there writers you love who deserve a much larger audience than the one they have? Who?