Emily Goes to Exeter by M.C.Beaton

A dead employer's legacy of five thousand pounds allows spinster Hannah Pym to resign from housekeeping and find adventure travelling the English countryside by stagecoach. 

But adventure soon finds Miss Pym in the form of Miss Emily Freemantle, a spoilt violet-eyed beauty fleeing an arranged marriage to a rake she has never met.

This is the first novel in the Travelling Matchmaker series by M.C.Beaton and I really enjoyed it.

It is not an overly complicated romance with nothing serious and deep happening and it probably sits at a level between a Mills and Boon romance and a Barbara Cartland book.

Hannah Pym has always wanted to travel and when her employer dies and leaves her with £5,000 (which according to one site I looked at would be about £5 million in today’s money). And so, the first thing she does is buy herself a ticket on the coach to Exeter. And so her adventure begins.

Hannah does strike me as being a little too pushy, so sure that she know what is best. This is fun to read and I do like her but I think that if I were in the receiving end of her matchmaking I wouldn’t be too blunt about telling her to mind her own business.

Emily (our secondary heroine) is a bit of a drip/ In good old shallow romances tradition she has fallen in ‘love’ with a man because of his looks and has ran away from home to escape the marriage that her parents had arranged for her.

That being said Emily does lose her shallowness and becomes a better person by the end of the book.

Lord Harley is once again your typical 30 odd regency bachelor who has suddenly realised that a few heirs wouldn’t go amiss and of course starts viewing Emily as a spoiled child (*cough* which she is).

The surrounding characters and background romance added a great level to the story as did that not so mysterious mystery.

Brilliant fun read!