The Earl's Complete Surrender

While the second title in Barnes's Thorncliff Manor series does occasionally stretch credibility, narrator Rebecca Rogers deftly manages the story's unusually unobservant spies. As the audiobook takes place concurrently with the previous Thorncliff Manor title, there's some plot overlap; nonetheless, this can easily be enjoyed as a standalone. The Earl of Woodford and Lady Newbury are both searching for a journal that will help to unmask a shadowy group of traitors to the Crown. Initially, they work individually and then in an uneasy truce, which slowly becomes a true partnership. The trust that grows between Woodford and Lady Newbury is delicately written and skillfully performed, with all its fits and starts, and is given especial depth as both share ugly secrets from their pasts. K.M.P. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

November 9, 2015
Barnes’s second Secrets at Thorncliff Manor just-post-Regency romance (after Lady Sarah’s Sinful Desires) follows James, who is an earl and a spy, and Chloe, a well-born widow whose husband abused her, as they search the aforementioned manor for a book in which evil antimonarchical conspirators called the Electors have for some reason decided to write a list of their members. James must learn that he cannot devote his life entirely to espionage, Chloe must learn to come out from under the shadow of trauma, and the reader, unfortunately, fails to learn why a conspiracy against a Hanoverian monarch is being run by the soi-disant Electors when one of the hereditary titles of the Hanoverian dynasty was Elector of Hanover. The book’s Electors are anarchists or something similar—it’s never made clear. This historical blunder is only one symptom of the general muddiness, inconsistent characterization, melodramatic plot, and tangled verbiage throughout the novel. There is a distinct sense that the characters are continually ducking into secret passages and secluded rooms solely in order to avoid bumping into the first book’s plot, as otherwise one manor, no matter how sumptuous, simply would not be large enough.