The Hellion's Waltz by Olivia WaiteMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
2.5 stars
Her father may have begun to recover from Mr. Verrinder’s fraud. But Sophie still had a long, long way to go.
The Roseingrave family have moved from London to Carrisford after falling prey to a swindler. Their oldest daughter Sophie feels at fault for not seeing what was happening and this has led her to step away from her music playing. When she sees what looks like some woman about to be taken advantage of she tries to step-in.
Maddie Crewe is angry at seeing her friends and family being taken advantage of, so with their help, she's running a swindle on the biggest perpetrator, Mr. Giles. When a new woman in town inadvertently almost endangers it and then catches on, she has to trust her instincts and attraction with letting her in.
This woman was how she’d imagined every cruel heartbreaker in every old ballad she’d ever heard. If you were lucky, you pined away for love of her. If you weren’t lucky, you won her, lost her, and were damned. Here was Sophie, craving damnation.
The Hellion's Waltz is third in the Feminine Pursuits series, I haven't read the first two but I never had a sense of being lost starting here. We're first introduced to Sophie's musical family, her former opera singer mother, piano builder father, and musically inclined siblings, Sophie herself plays the piano and composes music. The story and characters take on this musical vibe, I thought the beginning gave us the talented orchestra, laid out the movements, but the second half and ending finished in a diminuendo.
Madeleine Crewe was a ribbon weaver and the current chairwoman of the Carrisford Weavers’ Library (formerly Weavers’ Library and Reform Society, changed for prudence’s sake when the magistrates had started to look askance at any group with the word reform in their name).
