Review
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Title: A Heart Worth Stealing
Author: Joanna Barker
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Genre: Proper Romance
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages: 288
Binding: Paper
ISBN: 978-1639931040
Price: 13.99
Reviewed by Lisa Harris for the Association of Mormon Letters
For fans of Regency Romance, A Heart Worth Stealing is certainly a book worth reading. Joanna Barker deftly interweaves mystery and romance into the plot, which kept me turning pages. Unraveling the mystery had more twists and turns while the love story ran along enjoyable but expected lines.
I also enjoyed the way Barker centered the heroine’s experience, noting the ways that male characters (excluding the hero) underestimated her abilities because of her gender, thus illustrating the unfair constraints women were bound by in the 1800s. With her father dead, our main character, Genevieve Wilde, a young female heiress born of a common governess, had few options even as the Mistress of Wimbourne. Instead of leaving the mystery of the theft of her father’s watch in male hands as she had been advised to do, Genevieve fights against these recommendations and hires an independent investigator, former Bow Street officer, Jack Travers. Their attraction to one another is evident from the start. Travers himself is on the margins of polite society, thanks to his occupation and his parentage, and thus sees Genevieve differently than any other character.
The high-stakes denouement, including the solving of the mystery, had me reading long after midnight. I do want it known that my suspicions about the thief were correct. However, it did keep me guessing on a few other points until the very end. On the whole, the book reminded me quite a bit of the PBS series “Miss Scarlet and The Duke.” Like the heroine of that show, Genevieve bucks societal expectations to keep her father’s legacy and estate intact all while clashing and canoodling with Travers. All in all, it’s an entertaining and enjoyable read.
Lisa Rumsey Harris is the author of “Not Her First Rodeo” and “The Unlikely Gift of Treasure Blume.”