cover image The Lady Travelers Guide to Deception with an Unlikely Earl

The Lady Travelers Guide to Deception with an Unlikely Earl

Victoria Alexander. HQN, $7.99 mass market (384p) ISBN 978-0-373-80406-1

Alexander continues her celebration of multigenerational female bravado and intensifies the complexity of this delightfully over-the-top series through a fantastical Egyptian travelogue, and playfully praises the value of telling a good adventure tale through its imaginative, fiction-writing female lead. The newspaper that publishes Miss Sidney Gordon Honeywell’s successful serial, “Tales of a Lady Adventurer in Egypt,” has encouraged its readers’ impression that the fanciful stories are based on her own experiences, but her grandmother’s diaries are the real source. Harry Armstrong, with a sheaf of unpublishably tedious accounts of his Egyptian travels and an unexpected new title, challenges her to a trip to Egypt to prove her expertise, which she accepts, accompanied by a reporter and the three enthusiastic widows of the Lady Travelers Society. Sidney’s enchanting optimism and self-assurance lead Harry to shift his focus from exposing her falsehoods to protecting her as she continues her grandmother’s search for a rare artifact. His natural charm and the old ladies’ social manipulations seed their romance, leaving the reader happily imagining the couple’s future adventure beyond the pages of the book’s finale. (Nov.)