Holly is woken up in the middle of the night by a phone call from her tearful and frightened young niece — it seems her brother had gone out and never came home. Immediately upon her arrival in Ashdown Park, where their family owns a summer property, Holly can sense that something is not right; Ben would never knowingly leave his six-year-old child alone. It isn't long before her brother's mysterious disappearance appears to be connected to two centuries-old artifacts once in the possession of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia.

Initial DNF review, October 2022: I detected pretty quickly that the writing wasn't as polished as I would like, but I thought I'd give it a few chapters to see if it grew on me. Alas, it was not to be. Two early characters were egregiously one-dimensional, and an accumulation of unrealistic character interactions finally annoyed me so much that I had to abandon the book during chapter four.

Second attempt, April 2023: I thought I had washed my hands of this book, but one of the Read Harder categories for 2023 was "a book you DNFed." In looking over the short list of books I had abandoned in recent years, I deemed this one likely still most palatable, and I attempted to be more forgiving the second time around. Clearly Holly needed to break up with Guy in order to free her to move to Ashdown, but what makes it problematic as a plot device is that Holly having been with (engaged to!) someone like Guy in the first place suggests she had colossally poor judgment. Luckily, both Guy's and Tasha's presences are short-lived. The writing was passable, the story was just okay. I'm not really into mystical objects in what is otherwise a perfectly normal, non-fantasy setting, and I'm really not into magical realism.