Lynn Spencer's Reviews > Liaison with the Champagne Count

I have to admit that this one was something of a disappointment. It started off so well, and then just veered off into a very rushed ending. This book is first in a trilogy centered on three young widows who lost their husbands to the Holmfirth flood in 1852. Emma Greyville-Luce lost her husband Garrett to the flood. While Garrett had been much older, the book makes it clear that this had been a love match for both of them and that Emma deeply mourns her loss.

However, Garrett's children from his first marriage did not care for their young stepmother, and his son and heir wastes no time in casting her out of the family home after the reading of the will. To the son's dismay, Garrett left his property in France to Emma and Emma relocates there, determined to start over and perhaps even to build a business there in wine country. Emma helped her father run his successful gin empire so while she does not know wine, she does know trade.

When Emma shows up, this causes no small amount of consternation for her husband's estate manager Julien Archambeau. You see, our buddy Julien is from an aristocratic family who lost their lands in the Revolution. Egged on by his uncle who remembers and longs for the old glory days, Julien has been nursing a dream of reclaiming the family land. The fact that Emma plans to take up residence there and (gasp!) take up the reins of the business blows a big hole in his plans.

In the initial chapters, the author does a fantastic job of setting up her story. Emma's grief rings true, and the details of her character show her to be a determined lady. I actually liked Emma quite a bit. She's smart and more importantly, she's smart enough to be humble and admit to what she doesn't know. And after having suffered through snobbery in England due to how her father made his money, as well as having lost a beloved spouse, Emma has a certain vulnerability as well.

Julien is a little harder to like. Apparently getting jilted by his fiancee turned him into a recluse - and then there's that whole matter of him coveting Emma's land. Still, he could have undermined Emma and run circles around her in the "how to run a winery" department but he chose not to. That integrity earned him points in my book. If I had to describe Julien, I'd say he is confident rather than alpha. He knows his land and his business and doesn't see a need to prove himself by bullying the heroine or anyone else.

As Emma and Julien start working together, the mutual respect and friendship that develops made for some good scenes. I enjoyed seeing Julien teach Emma more about the wines and the grapes. I also liked how the author showed Emma's development as a character in the early chapters. Ms. Scott has scenes that show Emma thinking deeply about how much she loved her husband and remembering the good parts of that relationship. Since the main action in the book starts up only a month or two after Garrett's death, it makes sense for Emma not to be ready to move on entirely just yet.

However, the book started to lose me when the author makes an abrupt shift from mourning to Emma suddenly being ready to hop right on Julien. I can accept that folks mourn differently and are ready for new relationships at different paces. However, the whiplash-inducing jump into a new relationship only 2 months after being widowed did not feel true to this particular character. Emma was growing as a person and making it clear that she needed time to figure herself and her own inner life out so the acceleration of a new relationship felt more like an author realizing that she was going to run out of page count if she didn't get this train moving rather than a character actually falling in love.

Had this book's plot been spread over a longer time period, it probably would have worked for me. If writing as strong as what I saw in the opening chapters extended across the entire novel, this would have been a five star read for me. Unfortunately, the ending didn't match the quality of the opening for me.