Julie Klassen turned me into a Regency fan — I discovered I loved the time of Jane Austen’s England, but alas Julie only writes one book a year. With Moonlight Masquerade, Ruth Axtell joins this time period…and does so with an eye on the details that I was transported into this tale of impossible love and forbidden longing.

Take a French emigre who is the widow of British nobility and add in a British foreign office employee who is posing as her butler and you have a recipe for a book filled with tension. Add in a dash of spying, a pinch of counter-espionage, and a dollop of  intrigue stirred with a generous helping of interest in each other and it created a recipe for a book that drew me happily to its pages.

Sometimes it is hard to tell if you are the cat or the mouse.