November 15, 1993
The owners of the Poor Relation Hotel are busy once again. This time, Sir Philip Sommerville has installed a vulgar, grasping woman in the hotel, and his co-owners are frantic to remove her. At the same time, they decide they must help a young guest find a husband. These experienced schemers almost make and break the wrong matches, but greed is revealed, and love triumphs. Like the others in this series (e.g., Lady Fortescue Steps Out, LJ 1/92; Miss Tonks Turns to Crime LJ 3/1/93), this is a lighthearted romp by a prolific genre author. Chesney skillfully creates spirited characters, including the older principals, and places them in a believable period atmosphere. For Regency collections.-- Barbara E. Kemp, Library Consultant, Reston, Va.
Copyright 1993 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
November 1, 1993
Sir Philip has committed many follies in the past three novels in Chesney's Regency series, The Poor Relations. Here, in the fourth entry of the series, he has fallen in love with a totally unsuitable woman who is eating the Poor Relations out of their meager profits. The ploy to separate Philip from his leeching lady becomes entangled with a plan to sponsor the coming-out party of a repressed hotel guest whose widowed mother is trying to keep her daughter out of the social scene in order to stay there herself. Amusing, but not the brightest star in Chesney's constellation of historical fiction. ((Reviewed Nov. 1, 1993))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1993, American Library Association.)