Book one in Elizabeth Everett's new Damsels of Discovery series, The Love Remedy is a touching story about two complicated people trying to get beyond their inner barriers and find bliss.
Lucinda – Lucy - Peterson is in charge of Peterson’s Apothecary. Her parents passed in a cholera epidemic, and now it’s just herself and her siblings, Juliet and David, out in the world. While Lucy runs the family business, David remains unreliable, refusing to stick with a single career and has lost the family a lot of money. Juliet is an apothecary working with the women’s clinic at the opposite end of town. Lucy is the practical one, doling out cures to the masses. At least so it seems at first.
Lucy is in a pickle because her medicinal receipts have been stolen by her ex-lover, who has made plenty of cash off of her throat lozenge recipe. When her formula for a croup remedy disappears, she hires a detective to find out what’s going on.
Jonathan Thorne is not your average detective, and has lived quite the life before stepping into sobriety and his Methodist faith. An former boxer, he’s an aristocrat who has eschewed that lifestyle and is raising his young, illegitimate daughter, Sadie. He and Lucy bounce off of one another like oil and water – at least to start with. True love might be waiting for the both of them – if they can manage to push away their own inner demons.
This is a great little romance, with incredibly well-sketched characters who do a great deal of growing up as the pages breeze by. Lucy and Thorne push and pull at each other, each of them understandably loaded with hang-ups. Lucy ensures occasional panic attacks, and is so intensely overburdened and overwound that she cannot achieve an orgasm; Thorne is afraid his sobriety will eke away, and so he clings to what he believes is best. They challenge and help each other.
The mystery of the receipts is well-handled, and Lucy’s siblings are not the cardboard cut-out characters they could have been. I liked Sadie especially, who feels like a credible child and has a fully developed personality all her own. As always with Elizabeth Everett, the writing and research are uniformly excellent.
It’s worth noting that characters from her Secret Scientists of London series pop up here, but the books can be read separately. The Love Remedy is one beautiful love story and one great slice of historical romance.
Sensuality: Warm
Publication Date: 03/2024
Recent Comments …
On my TBR; nothing pleases like a Bell.
I loved The Soulmate Equation by Christina Lauren, but I also loved their Josh and Hazel book, so it was…
The following were the ten I submitted. I left off one that I really love but I’ve never seen mentioned…
Most of the books on that list that have more than three votes are already on one of our lists.…
Have something ready for you to eat after the curry club is founded! Just remembering the food makes me feel…
I hope you’ll enjoy it!