The Perfect Lover

Simon Cynster is wealthy, eligible, and thoroughly bored by the marriage market's conventional offerings, so he begins looking in earnest at a house party at Glossup Hall, where the first woman to genuinely command his attention is Portia Ashford, a childhood friend who has always insisted she wants nothing to do with marriage. An unexpected kiss complicates their long familiarity, and the arrival of a murder at the house party complicates everything else. Stephanie Laurens's tenth Cynster novel weaves a country-house mystery through its Regency romance.

Simon Prebble narrates with the refined authority that the Regency setting and the series' elaborate social architecture demand, giving both the romance's emotional development and the mystery's procedural elements appropriate weight. His voice suits the period's particular blend of propriety and passion, the quality that makes Laurens's work such an effective meeting of genres. At under thirteen hours, the audiobook delivers both a satisfying love story and a genuine puzzle.