The Maiden at Midnight follows the lives of Isabella Hathaway and her mother and
two sisters after they arrive in London for their first season out of mourning
for their father. The father killed himself after bankrupting the family with
gambling debts. The only brother is MIA in the Napoleonic War, and Isabella's
fiancée has broken off their engagement in light of the scandal surrounding the
father's death.
Enter Male Protagonists, best friends since Eton - Joss,
6th Earl of Stoneley (whose estate is held in trust until 1 year and 1 day after
he is married) and Harry (waiting on Uncle to die so he can inherit obscene
amount of money)
Joss needs to wed an heiress quickly so that he can
repay 600 pounds to a loan shark (Gallows Jack). While attending a masquerade
ball, Joss gets drunk, and in that drunken stupor, decides to kidnap the woman
he fancies and elope. Harry tries to dissuade him from the idea, but Joss
doesn't listen. Kidnapping goes awry when Joss grabs the wrong girl (it is a
masquerade ball, after all), and Joss calls in Harry to help him clean up his
mess. Isabella is understandably furious, and through her attempts to secure her
own release from Joss' madness, comes to like Joss in a friend sort of way.
(He's mad, but not malicious.) After she returns home, she concocts her own plan
to help Joss get the woman he loves while finding a wealthy husband of her own
who can secure her family's future.
As Joss and his love's relationship
grows, so does Isabella's and Harry's, resulting in a happy ending for all. I
have to admit that I appreciated the slow development of Isabelle's and Harry's
relationship - they might have runaway thoughts or dreams, but they keep
themselves in check (mostly). So I have nothing but good thoughts about the plot
line and character development. HOWEVER, the editing was so poor that it
seriously distracted me from the book. I had to re-read sentences two or three
times to get the meaning. Commas should be used to join two independent
sentences! (,and ,but ,or) Where has the basic standard of grammar gone? Many of
the editing issues seemed to result from poor re-writes - the sentence changed
construction, but the superfluous words remained. Very disappointing on that
front. There was also the occasional repetition of narration - of descriptions
and thoughts that had already been fleshed out earlier in the book.
