I enjoyed reading Shady Lady by Elizabeth Thornton; it has likable characters and is written in a style that keeps the pages turning nicely. But once I closed it and thought back on the plot, all I could see were the book’s shortcomings.

In the prologue, a woman named Chloe is about to be attacked by an unnamed assailant. In her last moments, she manages to scribble a note to her best friend, Jo Chesney, who is the owner and publisher of a small newspaper in Stratford. When Jo receives this letter, she is confused, as are we: Chloe didn’t manage to put any useful information in the letter at all. (I was reminded of the irritating victim in a Sherlock Holmes story, who with her dying breath gasped “The speckled band!” instead of identifying her killer.)

Jo is a widow who took over the newspaper after the death of her beloved husband. On the same day that she receives Chloe’s cryptic letter, she gets a visit from an irate gentleman, Mr. Waldo Bowman, who demands that she stop printing gossip about him. Jo, along with her kindly aunt, sets off for London to find out more about Chloe, and they encounter Waldo on the way. They also stop at a boarding school to drop off a package of clothes for a local orphan, Eric; there they discover that Eric is being held in the most abusive of circumstances. Jo gets into a bit of trouble with the law while rescuing Eric, and calls upon Waldo for help.

The author juggles a whole lot of stuff in this novel, almost but not quite including the kitchen sink. There’s the search to discover what happened to Chloe, and the subplot about Jo’s growing love for the boy, Eric – not to mention Jo’s struggle to come to terms with her past – and an ambitious overarching theme about parenthood and responsibility. Somewhere in there, Jo and Waldo fall in love.

Jo and Waldo are both likable characters. I admired the heroine’s independence and intelligence, her determination to do the right thing. Waldo is arrogant and dictatorial, which generally worked for me, although I grew a bit tired of his jealousy of Jo’s deceased husband. Although these are not new and different romance character types, Thornton brought them both to life, and they felt real and immediate to me. I became so involved with their relationship that I actually had tears in my eyes during one of their arguments – not something that happens often, by any means.

Unfortunately, the suspense plot really takes this book over. The mystery of Chloe takes up quite a bit more room in this book than anything else, and is, for the most part, the driving force behind the plot, rather than the relationship. This is too bad, because I had a few problems with the mystery. Why did Chloe write such a useless letter? Why didn’t the villain find and destroy the letter, when he was destroying Chloe’s other belongings? Why didn’t Chloe take a maid to the house-party where she was killed? And the secret that motivated the crime seems like something that any number of people, especially servants, must have known about. Unless the villain got all of them out of the way, too?

In the second half of the book, too, I was disenchanted when some very stale and overused elements intruded upon the romance. One thing in particular was very disappointing to me – and unfortunately, since it’s a big spoiler, I can’t tell you what it is here. Let’s just say that there’s something about this romance that I found fresh and unusual, and halfway through the book there’s a plot twist that steals away all the freshness and returns us firmly to cliché-land. Also, why do so many books have to end with a climactic action sequence in which the heroine is rescued by the hero? Hasn’t it been done enough?

I read Shady Lady quickly and found it engrossing; the author is skilled, and her characters are nice people to get to know. Others might enjoy it more, but I found that all the plot holes and unoriginal elements detracted heavily from my reading experience.