Someone to Honor

Someone to Honor is the sixth book in Mary Balogh’s Westcott series, the long running Regency romance saga that began with Someone to Love in 2016. The Westcott family fortune was upended in the first book when the late Earl of Riverdale was revealed to be a bigamist whose first marriage had never been legally dissolved, throwing the legitimacy of his three children with his second wife into doubt and reshuffling the entire family’s social and financial standing.

This novel turns to Abigail Westcott, the youngest of the dispossessed children, who has spent the years since the scandal trying to figure out what kind of life is now available to her. The hero is Gilbert Bennington, the half brother of one of the family’s allies, a former soldier struggling with the wounds the Napoleonic wars left him. Both Abigail and Gil are people whose lives have been shaped by circumstances that were not their fault and that they have had to learn to carry with whatever grace they can manage. Their slowly developing recognition of each other is the emotional engine of the book.

Mary Balogh has been one of the most consistent producers in Regency romance for decades, with a back catalogue running into more than a hundred novels. Her style is calmer than the more action driven entries in the genre. The pleasure of a Balogh novel is in the careful psychological work she does with her characters, in the long conversations between two people who are slowly learning who the other actually is, and in the historical detail that grounds her settings without becoming the point of the book.

For longtime Westcott series readers, Someone to Honor delivers another satisfying entry that develops the family’s recovery from the original scandal. For new readers, the series rewards being read in order, but Someone to Honor can be picked up as a standalone. Balogh handles enough of the recap to keep the reader oriented.