A Delicate Deception

The Regency Impostors, Book 3

By: Cat Sebastian

Narrated by: Joel Leslie

Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

When Amelia Allenby escaped a stifling London ballroom for the quiet solitude of the Derbyshire countryside, the very last thing she wanted was an extremely large, if - she grudgingly admits - passably attractive man disturbing her daily walks. Lecturing the surveyor about property rights doesn’t work, and somehow, he has soon charmed his way into lemon cakes, long walks, and dangerously heady kisses.

The very last place Sydney wished to be was in the shadow of the ruins of Pelham Hall, the inherited property that stole everything from him. But as he awaits his old friend, the Duke of Hereford, he finds himself increasingly captivated by the maddeningly lovely and exceptionally odd Amelia. He quickly finds that keeping his ownership of Pelham Hall a secret is as impossible as keeping himself from falling in love with her.

But when the Duke of Hereford arrives, Sydney’s ruse is revealed and what started out as a delicate deception has become a love too powerful to ignore. Will they let a lifetime of hurt come between them, or can these two lost souls find love and peace in each other?

©2019 Cat Sebastian (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers

That Nothern Accent...

I love Cat Sebastian's books but this was my first time listening to the audio version since my library only gets them in ebook and I got impatient waiting for this one so I bought it for myself. I was a little put off initially by the vibrato in the narrator's voice but I soon fell in love with the variety of accents/regional dialects. The male love interest, Sydney, has a somewhat lower class northern English accent and I just love it so much. You get so much of who that character is just from his voice.
I loved the main characters as well as the supporting characters. Sydney's best friend/ ex-boyfriend very much reminded me of Lord Akeldama from Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series, just blind and not a vampire.
The main couple in this story are both bisexual who happen to fall in love with people of opposite genders and the moment they realize they both have that in common and dont need to keep that part of themselves secret was so sweet. This is a sequel to Unmasking the Marquess but references to that book are pretty minimal and I dont think the reading experience is really harmed by not having read that book first.

In which the Enemy is Social Anxiety

That's it, that's the chief problem to be dealt with in the book. Amelia is a young female novelist living in seclusion after she had a very public melt-down at a ball and can't deal with people anymore, Sydney is a Quaker engineer still mourning the death of his brother and sister-in-law, who can be rather deaf to social nuance but means well and gets a bit wound up with it. They both, in mild ways, come across as people on the autism spectrum. Amelia in particular comes across as an Aspie who was raised with a hardcore Company Manners script and has a lot of residual anxiety about "people won't like the real you". In the tradition of a romance, they get to live happily ever after, in the manner they want to, though not in a conventional get-married-and-live-together way. (Amelia's social anxiety doesn't go away because she meets Sydney; she does get more comfortable managing it and expressing her limits. So it's a win.)

The B-couple is just darling - Georgie and Lex can reliably make each other laugh, and that's a pretty good way to start a marriage. There's some stuff with histrionic historical novel-writing, and people gently twitting each other, and why a Quaker in particular might insist on getting the railroads he's building right. We get to see a little of what's going on in the lives of people from the earlier books. It's short on alarums and excursions, but if you, like me, also deal with social anxiety, it really is rather lovely.

That said, I hated almost all of the character-voices Joel Leslie used, and found his narration a bit grating. Will be re-reading it, not re-listening to it.