From Governess to Countess

The January 2026 #TBRChallenge is "Still Here." Wendy had some excellent suggestions for how this prompt may be defined, and my choice definitely fell squarely in the middle of them. Ms Kaye is an auto-read, auto-buy, auto-Mount TBR author for me. This is a series that I started 8(!) years ago but have yet to finish. In fact, the next book in this series was the first I actually read by the author, and the one that made me fall in love with her style and set about collecting her backlist. I've enjoyed the other books that I've read in this series, and find the idea of The Procurer character to be quite original.

Unfortunately, this book - these characters, the plot - just did not work for me.

There is absolutely no friction in the show more romance, for one. Aleksei and Allison start kissing on Day 2 of their acquaintance and basically give up any pretense of her merely being a governess to his nieces and nephew right away. There is no tug, no push/pull, no yearning or longing. They immediately act on their instalust, and this is just incredibly boring to me. They don't really know each other; Aleksei hired Allison to help him determine if his brother the Duke had been murdered or not, and spends the first day of their acquaintance warning her that Russian Society is full of backstabbing, hypocritical, bloodthirsty people. Somehow, this doesn't dissuade her from immediately jumping his bones.

Allison's reputation had been shredded back in London and she became a recluse against the accusations against her. She doesn't appear to have the same reservations at an Imperial court; she reasons that if everybody thinks she's Aleksei's mistress, then why shouldn't she be? And yet, in the third act she lets their class differences come between them again. I was like - make up your mind, please, whether you care about Society or not! I hate it when characters are internally inconsistent like this.

And the big murder mystery, the reason why Allison is even in Aleksei's orbit to begin with? That turned out to be a great big nothingburger of a plot. The Duchess killed the Duke because she was having an affair with his cousin, and when the cousin tried to break it off she went crazy and ended up poisoning herself by accident, leaving her children without either parent, which makes no goddamn sense. Not that it mattered too much, since it only got in the way of these two rutting like rabbits.

So much of the little details were just glossed over. Allison's charges dislike her from the start, and then magically decide they adore her, without us seeing that transformation on the page. Allison and Aleksei fret over Society and reputation, but we only see one interaction at the very beginning, so this 'threat' to their happiness feels shallow and artificial. Ultimately, I was just left cold by this.

I've had this issue before - having a negative reaction to the first book in a miniseries by this author, only to absolutely adore the ones that come after it. I've no idea why this happens, and I hate that it does, but I'm glad I've read enough of her other work to know that these are rare misses for me.

I still have one more book in this miniseries (#3, His Rags-to-Riches Contessa), and hopefully I will get to it sooner rather than later! show less

So Russia during the Regency period, I haven't read a lot of these, employed some langugage handwavium (mostly true, court stuff was in English and French for the most part but if our heroine wants to involve herself with charitable apotecary works she would need to learn Russian, no question about that but it's a minor hitch in what is otherwise quite an interesting story of a woman who goes to help someone find truth and also finds love. Her hero is the second son of aristocracy and the next count is his ward. He's not sure he wants to deal with the complications of children rather than being a soldier.

The mystery was a little rushed and felt like it was almost an afterthought but the romance was pretty good.