Zoe Archer has been one of my favorite authors since that one time she basically saved my sanity (even if she was also the indirect cause of one of the worst reading experiences of my life). No matter what, I can always count on her for strong, determined heroines with all sorts of agency, and heroes that also were strong and worthy and respectful of the women that chose them. While I like the adventure romances of Zoe Archer very much, you can all imagine my grabby hands when she announced that she was going to write straight historicals under the name Eva Leigh.

This is the first one of that series, and it was totallllly worth the wait.

Daniel is the Earl of Ashford, and he’s got a bunch of problems. First, his BFF from his school days came home from the Napoleonic Wars with a RAGING case of PTSD and then disappeared. Second, this damn gossip column keeps writing about him, and it’s not always flattering (which, whatever) but if people keep following him around and writing about everything he does, then they might realize that his BFF is missing and we can’t have that.

So he marches himself over to the offices of The Hawke’s Eye to confront Mr. E. Hawke only to discover that Mr. E. Hawke is Miss Eleanor Hawke and his whole plan goes sideways. They come to an arrangement where she’ll accompany him on his evening shenanigans, and write about what he shows her. She gets access, he gets to control the story, it’s a win-win!

Until of course, they start developing pants-feelings (tm Captain Awkward) for each other and things get Complicated.

It’s not a particularly avant garde plot, but Leigh’s strength has always been her characters. Tropes are tropes for a reason.

Eleanor is determined to hold on to what independence she can get, and she’s content in being outside of society: it allows her more freedom than she would have if she gave a fuck about what people thought about her. She’s smart, she’s a student of the human condition (she is a journalist, after all), and she’s dryly funny. When Daniel starts with his “I’m an Earl and people do what I say,” she pretty much tells him what he can do with himself until he starts acting like a person. And when he’s like “okay, so I was going to a gaming hell, so…” it’s no trouble at all. She hangs out with enough theater people that she gets together a very good young man disguise. This leads to a hilarious scene in which Daniel teaches her how to walk like a man (so as to protect the meat and potatoes between her legs) and then she card sharks everyone.

Daniel is a character we have seen before – a very rich rake with a good heart. He was the heir, so he wasn’t allowed to do anything with his life and join the army like he kinda wanted, but he is loyal and protective of his friends, and willing to get into bed (figuratively, then literally) to keep speculation about Jonathan out of the papers. Well, the literally into bed isn’t to protect Jonathan, so that was hardly a sacrifice.

I like these two.

The B plot about the search for Jonathan (which I hope is a set up for a further book in the series) is interesting, but mostly I’m here for the snark and delight spiced with a tiny bit of mostly class-based angst for Daniel and Eleanor. I’m always happy to see more people writing historicals, and I’ve been saving my ARC for the next book in series until I had this review written. NOW I CAN READ IT YAY.