This was much, MUCH better than the companion book The Lost Duke of Wyndham, but it ultimately still falls into the middling range of Quinn novels.

A huge part of that was the fact that it's largely just a rehash of The Lost Duke of Wyndham and so reading them back-to-back it suffers because you've just read a bunch of these scenes but from a different POV.

That said, Amelia & Thomas's story was unilaterally more compelling and believable than Grace & Jack's (who I could never quite believe shared anything other than a shallow infatuation), particularly in terms of how it resolves itself.

Flatly stated: Thomas having to redefine his identity and figure out who he is if he's not the Duke of Wyndham is just a much more interesting story than Jack's tacked-on angst about various things. Not to mention that Thomas gets a much better conclusion as the only legitimately interesting conflict Jack had was the fact that he didn't want to be the duke and was woefully unsuited for it, but The Lost Duke of Wyndham does an atrocious job of actually dealing with that at all. I honestly couldn't believe it at the end of the book when he's basically just like OH WELL I GUESS IT'S COOL. And then we just jump to an epilogue where, oh look, he's actually a great duke after all and Grace does all his reading for him! It was abominably lazy, especially after spending the entire book reflecting on all the many ways that Jack's general character and temperament were unsuited to be duke, to try to pretend in the 11th hour that it was really only his dyslexia that was the issue.

This book is worth reading, and is probably much better read WITHOUT bothering with The Lost Duke of Wyndham at all.