Silver Lady is a fresh new step for Mary Jo Putney in a lot of ways. It’s a fantasy historical, with some interesting magical systems at play. But at heart, it’s an historical romance, and it’s a well-paced and decent one with likable people struggling against some truly nasty ones.

Merryn has been stricken with amnesia and muteness. She doesn’t know why she’s been kidnapped until it’s explained to her that she has a Gift – the ability to see into the future. Her captors want to use her for that purpose, but unfortunately she doesn’t know how to use it, much less control it.

Enter Bran Tremayne an officer for the Home Office, and nobility to boot – though he is loathe to admit it. His father, Lord Penhaligon, abandoned him as a child once Bran’s Gift became apparent, and after the death of his wife, married again and had a second family. But with his sons dead, Penhaligon now wants to re-instate Bran as his heir, and Bran has traveled to Cornwall to tell him he wants nothing to do with him.  He finds Merryn as she flees her kidnappers and is immediately sympathetic to her plight. His Gift is a well-honed investigative ability, which makes him quite the asset to the Crown. He takes Merryn back to his family’s seat to recuperate.

Avoiding his biological father at all cost, Bran teams up with his adopted sister, Lady Tamsyn Tremayne, to help restore Merryn back to her full health. While the mutual attraction between Merryn and Bran grows, Bran investigates some discord at the port of Plymouth with his adopted brother, Cade, and tries to figure out who wanted to hurt Merryn. The cases dovetail, but will they both survive the strain?

Silver Lady is a fine, well-researched romance that makes good use of the War of 1812 as its backdrop. The magical worldbuilding, though, leaves a little to be desired, and the book is somewhat overcrowded with subplots.

Merryn… is a problem. She is not herself for the first quarter of the book, which makes the romance awkward, to say the least. I wish Putney had done a little bit more with the notion of a disabled person finding love, but Merryn soon regains her wits and the power of speech as well as her memory, and she and Bran don’t get together until she has. Bran is a good man who’s been through a lot and I respected him. The romance itself is nicely paced, once it finally gets going.

But there are just way too many plotlines going on here. We have Merryn’s pursuit of recovery, we have the threat of the two mysterious people who kidnapped her looming over everything, we have Bran and his conflict with his father, we have the Tremaynes and their large adoptive sequel factory – I mean family – and we have the stuff going on at the docks. It all comes together, but it takes a very long time to do so.

That’s what makes Silver Lady good but not great. Perhaps the magical elements will sharpen up in the next volume and the hero and heroine of that piece will be themselves from the first. But those who don’t mind a little bit of bitter with the batter, this will be a decent read.