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How I discovered this book: It was a submission to Rosie Amber's Book Review Team, of which I am a member. I have read two of the author's other books and enjoyed them, most recently The Crown Spire.
The Mistress of Blackstairs is set in Covent Garden in the late 18th century, where the mysterious, veiled Madame Moineau runs an establishment in which she provides entertainment for some of the moneyed men of London. In reality she is former courtesan Georgie Radcliffe. In the winter of 1785, two men appear in her life. The first is portrait artist Anthony Lake, looking for the daughter he has never met, and the second is someone she would rather not remember, Viscount Polmear. Georgie and Anthony's lives become entwined as they face a mutual foe.
There is no doubt that the author knows her subject very well, and she portrays the period in intricate detail, creating a lovely atmosphere of the time and showing the pretensions of the well-to-do against the seamier side of life, with the whores and gambling. It's a jolly good story, with some evocative description that I enjoyed very much; the dialogue is interesting and adds to the characterisation in each case, from the snooty Viscount Polmear to the dialect of the kitchen staff, young Molly (Georgie's ward), and the ladies of the night.
I didn't enjoy the book quite as much as I'd expected to, alas, because I felt it could have benefitted from some redrafting/editing to tighten it up and make the actual prose read more smoothly. The punctuation bothered me; there are blocks with no commas where I thought there should have been some, which meant I had to read passages twice to get their meaning. There was too much use of the words 'and then', where a semicolon, instead, would have made the whole paragraph read so much better. I'd sum it up as a very good book, let down by less than satisfactory editing and proofreading.
Thank you Terry.
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