This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by Harper Gray. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Long Historical category.

Here is Harper Gray's review:

This book should have been my catnip. Brooding Egyptologist hero! Well-travelled curator heroine! Manorial espionage and mystery! I was there for that like you wouldn’t believe.

Unfortunately, the book wasn’t really there with me.

This is, again, a part of a series—the fourth installment by all appearances. The framing narrative is the presentation to a young woman of unspeakably judgmental shoes (they only fit if she’s worthy of true love?!) by a professional matchmaker (fairy status unknown). It’s a bit unfortunate, really, since the story would not only have been better off without the back-bending to make Lady Milford’s intervention necessary, it would have stood a fighting chance of almost making sense.

Even more than Lady Milford, though, the story has Sir Seymour Jones to thank for an awful lot of head-scratching. There have been baronetcies created for Joneses, but given Sir Seymour’s predilection for ancient artefacts I maintain the probability of an homage to Indy. What dingbattery the story can’t lay at the feet of Lady Milford is largely due to Sir Seymour being a terrible archaeologist, an irresponsible baronet and parent, and generally rather dumb.

For example, for reasons too spoilery to mention here, Sir Seymour never mentions the Grayson family or his relationship to them to his daughter. Apparently, it is mentioned nowhere in his notes (of which Bella is the curator), either. Now, it is not spoilery to say that Sir Seymour and our beastly hero’s father – to say nothing of our beastly hero himself – were really very close indeed. On the other hand, it is never particularly well explained just how our Lady Milford knew the late baronet.

But I suppose we are meant to trust the judgment of the shoes: Clearly it makes more sense for a matchmaker to cause a young woman to deceive a reclusive beast of an Egyptologist into granting her employment so that she can sneak around his mansion looking for a map, rather than for Bella to contact the son of her father’s old professional associate (or, if we’re going to maintain the pretence of her father resolutely not mentioning their relationship at all, one of his other professional associates, of which there had to have been plenty, since you don’t manage to have an archaeological career without them, even in the late nineteenth century) in order to find out (a) who this Aylwin is and (b) what he knows about a treasure and a map.

The beastly hero – who is a very beastly beast, apparently, despite being devastatingly handsome and at worst only slightly grumpy and extremely reclusive – does have a decent motive not to trust this woman who comes barging in, claiming relationship with a man to whom he (not a spoiler, promise) looked up to almost as a father-figure and who disappeared mysteriously out of his life. But he decides to accept her as an employee based on the conviction that he can wring information out of her about an event that occurred when she was very young and that she at best hardly remembers. After all, she doesn’t remember him, and they were apparently fairly close at that time (or as close children with a hefty age difference can be).

That being said, once the story gets on a roll, the relationship between Aylwin and Bella is engaging and enjoyable. They’re neither of them stupid people (except when the plot needs them to be), and there were some genuinely delightful moments of chemistry between them.

Aylwin did have an irritating tendency to mansplain Bella’s negative reactions to him. While I appreciate the effort to show a man realising that his actions might have been interpreted differently than they were meant and why, the fact that Bella had gone through the same motions scant paragraphs before felt more heavy-handed than convincing.

Bella was…a puzzle. She had grown up in a variety of far-off lands and acquired a variety of skills, but few of these were detailed enough to seem believable. One’s mileage obviously will vary regarding factual errors, so while the ones I found bothered me I don’t think it’s really fair to make a big deal out of them. What I found more unsettling was an apparent attempt to approximate having a POC character (or at least having a third-culture-kid character who feels like a fish out of water in the dominant culture) while at the same time exoticising her and her experience.

I’m annoyed that I can’t make myself more coherent on this point, but I have reread this book a couple of times while writing this review and still can’t figure out how to make my discomfort more articulate. Perhaps it’s partially the fact that Drake draws attention (through speech, clothing, memories) to the fact that Bella has had these experiences in other cultures and feels “othered” in England, yet she doesn’t provide enough specific (and accurate) detail or atmosphere to convince me that these experiences where believable. Her siblings don’t appear to suffer the same compunctions that she does, and they would have had a similar upbringing.

And it isn’t just Bella who has this problem; the Egyptian valet, Mr Hasani, is repeatedly described in stereotypical terms. To get into it does involve spoilers for the ending, so be warned:

And while we’re on the subject of the ending, let’s talk about Bella’s archival skills for a moment:

All in all, this is an odd book. By the end I found myself in the weird position of having enjoyed it while not believing in it at all. Readers with backgrounds in archaeology and related fields might wish to take note that the professional representation of archaeology and curatorial work is pretty much on par with an Indiana Jones film. The mystery and manorial espionage was decently fun, though, as was the interaction between Aylwin and Bella.

Having read it and reread it, I just can’t stop shrugging uncomfortably in response. Parts of it were fun, other parts left a bad taste in my mouth. Parts of it were well thought out, others made no sense at all. Overall, it’s a pessimistic-tending ‘meh’.