Cassandra (Cassie) Richards, who lived in Jamaica for the past 14 years, recently lost her parents and has returned to England to be with her Aunt Chat. The two women, and Cassie’s friend Antoinette, have come to Cornwall to visit Aunt Chat’s friend – the Dowager Lady Royce. Lady Royce’s son Phillip, Earl of Royce, is currently immersed in the fascinating business of writing a tome about the Peloponnisian War.

Cassie is intrigued by the ghosts that supposedly reside in Royce Castle. The academic Phillip, of course, doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he is immediately taken with Cassie, who isn’t precisely the kind of young woman he was expecting. Having grown up on a plantation in Jamaica, she is not as vapid and shallow as the young ladies to whom he is accustomed. He annoys her briefly with his skepticism about ghosts, and also makes a misstep early in the novel by asking if her companion Antoinette is her slave. It’s a perfectly reasonable question given the historical realities of the period, and Cassie reacts with perhaps a little more outrage than is merited. But Phillip, gentleman that he is, apologizes abjectly and wins her forgiveness, and she finds herself quite drawn to him, while having some rather improper thoughts about his build. (Regency misses, of course, don’t admire pecs or glutes – they naturally confine themselves to vague thoughts about “musculature.”) But it doesn’t escape her notice that aside from being handsome, he is really quite a nice fellow, and perhaps not as dull as he first appeared.

Phillip is a standard-issue scholarly hero. He practically lives in his library, wearing tattered and ink-stained clothes quite unsuitable to his station in life. It wouldn’t be stretching the definition to call him a geek, although one suspects the term may not date quite back to the early nineteenth century. If perchance the term was ever used in that period, however, it must have been coined to describe the bespectacled Phillip, who enjoys reading Thucydides and is writing a dull, dusty series of books on Greek history. He could best be described as, if you’ll pardon the pun, a geek scholar. He’s also a skeptic and doesn’t believe in the supernatural, despite the best efforts of the ghosts that reside in the castle. There’s little to distinguish him from any other similar hero, although I admit to a weakness for geek heroes (since I’m married to one) and I found Phillip likable enough.

Cassie is a heroine who knows how to have fun, and Phillip, who’s forgotten how, is at first bewildered by her simple, childlike joy in perfectly ordinary activities like running along the seashore. He admires her for it, though, and doesn’t think less of her because she’s not a bluestocking. Cassie, for her part, begins to read Phillip’s books on ancient Greece and is surprised to find that his writing is very moving. Under his guidance, she even begins to read The Iliad. Cassie influences Phillip, as well, and soon he’s riding with her and attending masked balls while his library grows dusty from disuse.

Minor characters include several surprisingly solid ghosts, as well as Antoinette, Cassie’s Jamaican friend. With the exception of Phillip’s faux pas in asking about Antoinette’s status, most of the characters seem to accept her as an equal with little difficulty, which I found unlikely for the period. Antoinette’s mother, who taught her how to sense spirits, was a Yaumumi priestess in Jamaica, and most of the characters, with the obvious exception of Phillip, accept her ability to sense spirits without question. Neither the ghosts nor Antoinette are particularly well-developed characters, which is perhaps unavoidable in a book of this length.

The romance between the main characters, however, is warm and believable, and the first part of the book is pleasant enough reading. Perhaps it’s a little too pleasant. The conflict is fleeting and episodic in nature, and the author just seems to drop in an external conflict every so often to spice up the plot. An internal, overarching conflict, a real and serious reason why Phillip and Cassie can’t let themselves fall in love, would have made this a better book.

Despite this reservation, however, I enjoyed this book pretty well until about two-thirds of the way through when a previously unseen and scarcely mentioned villain appears. Rarely have I seen a book derail so abruptly. The last third of the book isn’t bad enough to be described as a train wreck, but it’s definitely a bumpy ride. The villain is too petty to be truly villainous, and his motives aren’t terribly convincing. Worse, the plot’s resolution doesn’t satisfy; neither the hero nor heroine are completely aware of the villain’s nefarious schemes, and it’s left to other characters to save the day. I’m sorry to say I found the last third of the book jarring enough to drop my rating an entire grade.

A Loving Spirit is a fast-reading book with likable lead characters. But the lack of any substantial conflict, along with the unfortunate final third of the book – when the villain suddenly drops awkwardly into the plot like an anvil in a Roadrunner cartoon – makes it impossible to recommend.