The Runaway McBride by Elizabeth Thornton
First line: ”It was February, the coldest, most miserable February in Scottish memory.”
The hero is a seer! Do you know what that is? A person who can see parts of the future. This is an unusual hero of sorts. He comes across as an older, getting wiser character. His life has not been easy since the time he found his one-time-fiancée who’d run off with another man years before.
His grandmother, on her deathbed, brings together the three cousins to tell them she sees one of them as the profit of her gift (the seeing) but she cannot tell them which one is the beneficiary. The only thing she can say is that “his bride is in danger for her life” and he needs to save her.
The heroine is a teacher at a girls school for modern women who are interested in more than embroidery and domesticity issues. She is a spunky character not easily swayed from the path she sets forth for herself.
The mystery is intriguing, involving a mother she never knew much about, who left behind an encoded diary. Thornton does a nice job of spelling out the heroine’s anger with both the mother who deserted her, and a father, while raising her in a loving home, kept the knowledge of her mother a secret.
I love the fact that this book touches on the early feminism movement where young women were determined to be more than just wives and mothers. She does a nice job of introducing the soon-to-be-movement of the auto industry, as well.
The hero grows in his efforts of dealing with family members he’d ignored in the past – like a half-brother on the brink of manhood, doing things for attention – all negative, because it works, but dotes on the younger half-sister who, not surprisingly, is hard-headed.
For: Readers who find mystery and intrigue with headstrong female characters exciting and inspiring. - Kathy Wheeler