The Love Remedy

January 1, 2024

Everett ("Secret Scientists of London") starts a new series with the story of a Victorian woman apothecary who hires a private investigator to help her gain back her stolen formularies and prove that her erstwhile suitor committed theft. It is not going to be as easy as it looks. Lucy Peterson might be a brilliant scientist, creating cures for coughs and the croup, but she is not fully on top of the dispensing business and its endless ledgers. Plus, her siblings have agendas of their own that further complicate her work. Hiring the grumpy Jonathan Thorne, a boxer turned investigator, is a good step in the right direction, but he comes with history--and a daughter--that adds to the chaos over which Lucinda struggles to reign. Slowly the two start to trust and help each other, but Thorne's investigations prove deeply troubling and begin to net more than a thief--they threaten the very foundations of Lucy's world, not to mention her rather bruised heart. VERDICT Set against a backdrop of women's health care, scientific discovery, and social change, Everett's historical romance reads as quite a modern story. Suggest to fans of Evie Dunmore.--Neal Wyatt

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Starred review from January 15, 2024
Everett (A Love by Design) delights in her sharp and subversive Damsels of Discovery series launch. At 27, Lucinda Peterson is one of the only female apothecaries in 1843 London, having assumed responsibility for the shop her grandfather and father built, as well as for her two younger siblings and all of the less fortunate who fall ill in the city’s East End. After she puts her trust in the wrong man and he steals her revolutionary formula for sore throat drops, she’s at a loss. Desperate to recover at least some of the credit—and get revenge on her former beau—she hires an agent from Tierney & Co., which offers discreet private investigation services. Enter Jonathan Thorne, 32, a father of one, former prizefighter, recovering alcoholic, and estranged third son of a baron. When another of Lucinda’s formulas goes missing, Jonathan is drawn deeper into her secret world of women scientists fighting misogynists and providing reproductive healthcare when no one else will. Though he has sworn never to fall in love again after the death of his mistress, the more he gets to know brilliant, bighearted Lucinda, the more he can’t resist her. With sharp wit and a keen eye for matters of social justice, Everett brings the period to life while making clear just how far women’s rights have come—and how far they have left to go. This frank, flirty outing will have readers hooked. Agent: Ann Leslie Tuttle, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret.

February 1, 2024
A Victorian apothecary finds chemistry with the investigator she hired to retrieve her stolen medical formula. In the first installment of Everett's Damsels of Discovery series, private inquiry agent Jonathan Thorne meets Lucinda Peterson as she's asking his colleague to murder her former lover. Having inherited a small London apothecary, Lucy is shouldering the family business, with its working-class clientele, while being hounded by a moralist group that denounces nontraditional gender roles. To make matters worse, her ex, the son of a rival, decamped with the sore throat remedies she created. Though he had promised that their sexual relationship was a prelude to marriage, he dumped her as soon as he got her formula, even claiming that her enthusiastic sexuality made her unsuitable for marriage. When she hires Thorne--really to get back the formula, not kill her former lover--she doesn't know that he's the son of a baron, a once-dissolute boxer who turned his back on his aristocratic family to raise his biracial child with his late mistress. Devoted to his daughter, he now lives rigidly to guard against his alcoholism and venal tendencies. Meeting Lucy rouses his fierce passions as well as his wariness about beautiful women. Though he is discomfited by her stance on contraception and abortion, her devotion to her patients and her family forces him to question his dogmas about "good" women and examine the behavior of men. Lucy, in turn, has to decide if loving Jonathan is worth the risk to her heart and body. Scenes of their charged sexual interactions featuring light kink are interspersed with fraught conversations on bodily autonomy and balanced out by warm Dickensian family episodes. Melancholy and sexy in turns, a neo-Victorian love story that puts reproductive rights at the heart of a romance.

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