The Widower’s Folly was like the curate’s egg. Parts of it were very well done indeed, especially heroine Tessa Barlowe. The hero William, Lord Rivendale was a fairly pleasant character too, although he kept up his “I-am-not-going-to-fall-in-love-with-you” act for so long that it eventually became exasperating. And several of the secondary characters were likable, particularly William’s daughter Anna and his good friend Lord Kepley. But the story took a wild turn about three quarters of the way through, and that presented a problem.

Tessa’s family has a locket that when opened by a woman of the family will show her a fleeting glimpse of the face of the man she is to marry. When Tessa opens it, she briefly sees the face of a handsome man. But Tessa is not in a hurry to marry; her own parents were not happy in their marriage and she is quite content to write stories. Her children’s books are popular and getting more so. Tessa has hopes that perhaps someday she can be independent and not beholden to her kind brother-in-law, Sir Robert Stamford.

William, Lord Rivendale is very worried about his daughter Anna. She is six years old and has not spoken since the day she saw her mother killed in a carriage accident. The only thing that brings Anna out of her shell is when the nurse reads to her from her favorite book. William goes to the publishers and finds the author of Anna’s favorite book – Tessa. He asks her to come and read to Anna and to try and make some contact with her. Tessa is touched by William’s concern for his daughter and agrees.

Anna and Tessa establish a bond, and William becomes very fond of the gentle Tessa as well. Then Tessa gets involved in a scandal. Her publisher, who is looking for more sales, gets a hack writer to add characters based on Prinny, Beau Brummel, and other members of Society to Tessa’s latest book. One of the characters is a thinly disguised portrait of William and Tessa is afraid of losing her reputation by being in his company so much. So William proposes a marriage of convenience to save her reputation and to give Anna a mother.

The best part of the book comes when Tessa decides that she wants more from her marriage and in her quiet and ladylike way, gently seduces William. I loved seeing a woman as the aggressor and the very quietness of Tessa’s seduction was quite erotic in its restrained way.

As long as the book focused on William and Tessa, I liked it very much, but just when I was getting very interested in the characters and their relationship, I got detours – lots of detours. Almost the last quarter of the book is devoted to an episode where Tessa and her aunt, Miss Winsham, are kidnapped by a couple who are not happy with Miss Winsham’s crusade against chimney sweeps and child prostitutes. Miss Winsham is not at all likable as a character – she is snappish, rude and abrupt in conversation, and her crusade seemed to me to be based on principle alone (nothing wrong with that), but I didn’t sense she had much love for the victims she was trying to rescue. There is also a set-up for the third sister Lisabeth’s story which takes up space that I wanted to see devoted to Tessa and William.

I can’t say I disliked The Widower’s Folly. The writing is very smooth and pleasant and I did like Tessa very much. But the first book in the series, The Ambitious Baronet was much better – more focused on the characters and less on extraneous sub-plots. In my experience, second books in a trilogy are almost always the weakest. They have to re-cap the events of the first book and set the stage for the third. In the meantime, the impact of the second story can get lost, which is what happened in The Widower’s Folly. It’s a shame – good characters like Tessa and William deserve better.