Review: Captured by Mary Lancaster (2023)

I enjoyed the first of this series, built around the death in a duel of a duke, no less. The first book told the story of the duke’s young widow and the man who challenged him to the duel. This one features the duke’s sister and the doctor who attended the duel, and although it could be read as a standalone, it makes a lot more sense if read after the first book.

Here’s the premise: Lady Hera Severne is released from the oppression of her father, the Duke of Cuttyngham, when he dies in a duel. Uncertain what to do with her life now, she decides to become a paid companion, and finds a position surprisingly easily. Now this is a huge plot contrivance (why on earth would a duke’s daughter become a companion? It makes no sense, but I’m prepared to allow a book one contrivance at the start, so I’ll go with the flow here). Hera finds that her duties are light, and concerned less with her mistress, Lady Astley, than with her husband’s adult ward, who seems benign enough, if a little eccentric, yet is kept under constant watch living separately from the family. George is locked in with his nurse at night (shades of Jane Eyre and the madwoman in the attic), and even doped with laudanum when the family have guests to stop him disturbing the guests. An accidental overdose of laudanum causes Hera to send for the local doctor, who by a huge coincidence is the very same Doctor Rivers who attended the duel (that’s the second big contrivance). Doctor Rivers saves George, but he agrees with Hera that they have to ‘rescue’ him from his captivity.

It’s an odd thing, but this is the second Regency book I’ve read recently to feature an autistic person, but this one I found far less convincing. George was supposedly so disturbing as a boy that he was locked away, and the world told he was dead, yet when Hera and Justin set him loose in the world, suddenly he’s able to cope pretty well, with no more than mild eccentricity. I’m sorry, but even a non-autistic person who’d been locked away in a very restricted world for twenty-odd years would have serious trouble adjusting to the real world, so this element of the story didn’t work at all for me.

However, I was happy to whizz past all that with no more than a raised eyebrow, since the romance was charming and far more convincing, despite an outbreak of I’m-not-worthy-itis from the good doctor. But the couple (and George) end up in Brussels with the characters from book 1, where, with only a mild episode of melodrama matters are resolved in a satisfactory way. As is usual with Mary Lancaster’s books, there is some sex in the story, but it’s not terribly graphic. Despite the surfeit of contrivances, this is so well-written and enjoyably entertaining that I gave it four stars.