The Captain’s Secret is smoothly written, and the characters are nice enough, but reading it was like looking through the pages of La Belle Assemblee – pretty, but oh so lifeless.

When Susannah Lacey was 16, she met Captain Winston Jeffries. She did not know him long, but immediately fell in love. He was off to war, but he promised to write her, and gave her his jeweled stickpin to remember him by. Winston did write, but after the battle of Toulouse, he was listed as missing, and Susannah received no more letters.

Now Susannah is 19, a young lady in London with her sister and brother-in-law for the Season. At a party, Susannah sees Winston, whose manner to her is polite, but cool. She is hurt by his manner, puzzled as to why he did not write, and wonders why he is so standoffish.

Winston is in the employ of Lord Castlereagh of the Foreign Office as a spy. His mission is to court Caroline Dunsford, whose father is under suspicion as a spy for Napoleon. Castlereagh thinks that Dunsford has compromising letters from the French and he wants Winston to snoop and find them. In order to mix with Society and gain access to Caroline, Winston is posing as the good friend of Lord Ponsby.

Winston, Ponsby, Caroline, and Susannah form a foursome and proceed to do all the activities that fashionable young folks do during the Season. They go to Almack’s, they go to musicales, they go to crushes, they dance, they see the Elgin Marbles, Winston and Ponsby hang out at White’s, Weston’s and Gentleman Jackson’s salon. They go riding at the park, they eat, drink and party. And all this is described. And described. And described. I love social history, but really – this was laying it on rather thick.

Anyway, Caroline and Ponsby fall in love, while Susannah and Winston never have fallen out of love. But all during the book, Winston mopes around and worries about a Horrid Incident that happened to him during the war, and how he loves Susannah, but she has never been out of England and he wants to go to India, so how can he ask her, and if she finds out about the Horrid Incident she will hate him, oh woe is me!

But all is wrapped up in a nice big bow at the end of the book – how nice.

The Captain’s Secret is one of the most superficial Regency Romances I have ever read. The characters are pretty as can be, but have all the life of paper dolls. There are no villains in it, there are no surprises, there is no depth at all. Oh there’s a lot of surface prettiness, and a bit of charm, but that’s it. The characters simply act out their parts like puppets in a theatre.

While The Captain’s Secret is smoothly written and zips along at a good pace, it was simply too superficial and light to engage me. A Regency needn’t be dark and intense, but it must dip beneath the surface at some point. One of my favorite traditional Regencies is Mary Balogh’s The Famous Heroine. It is funny in the extreme, but it’s the characters were so well-drawn that they seemed to jumped off the page. The famous Cora and her dandyish Lord Francis were alive, vivid, and real, whereas Susannah and Winston are simply words on the page.