I skipped around in this book because a lot of the scenes had already been written in The Lost Duke of Wyndham, especially when Grace was there. As I'm one of her biggest fans (I feel like I say this particular sentence a lot when writing a Julia Quin review), I was actually quite disappointed in this book. I feel like a lot of the scenes that were already in the first were a cop-out, like the author couldn't think of much else to write about so she kind of tweaked things around and placed the scene in Thomas' perspective. 
 I wasn't terribly interested in the characters. There wasn't a lot of chemistry and what little else the author tried to put there, it wasn't feasible to me. I thought Thomas, in this book, was a bore and I just couldn't get into the book as much as I thought I would. So to keep it simple and short, Julia has written a lot better than this. Maybe it was just an off day.