I enjoyed this story, though it wasn't as strong as those coming before it in the series (hopefully the later books will make up for that). My main vice with it was that the author had an upper-class English woman talking about "ladybugs". They're not ladybugs in England, never have been, and the author should have done her research to keep from making that blatant language mistake. I'm not a big fan of British period characters speaking modern day American, especially when the author has them use modern day American words or terms that never existed in the British language. The author often seems to switch between what she belives to have been the manners of speech at that time and manners of speech that she's more comfortable with from our own culture today. She really needs to sort this out. Other than that the book was a good read.