When Alexander Edmund St Thomas Duvelle, 11th Earl of Ellismere returns home from ten years overseas to gather the bits and pieces of his ruined family, he does not expect to find love in the middle of chaos.
***
The Right Honorable Sir Alexander Edmund St Thomas Duvelle, younger brother of the dashing Earl of Ellismere has spent the last ten years or so with his hands in the Turkish dirt, searching for a past long gone while trying to flee his own. But when his brother mysteriously dies, Alexander is suddenly the earl, and he has to rush home to find the estate and ancestral seat of Ellismere in shambles. The coffers are empty, the house is derelict and the earldom is on the verge of collapse. All the while, the dowager countess' unruly sister is playing hazard with the family's reputation in Paris, and the death of Alexander's brother is still painfully unsolved. Something has to be done.
With help from surprising allies, Alexander must follow his late brother's last footsteps into the seedy underbelly of 19th-century London to figure out who murdered his brother and why, and maybe even find love along the way.
***
Hello! Thanks for reading this story. I hope you'll like it! It's still a draft, and maybe a bit of a slow burner, but eventually it'll get there (I hope!).
I'm probably going to change both the cover picture and the title, as it originally was for a whole different project, and I don't feel like it suits this one. The trouble is, coming up with a new one is sometimes a little hard;)
*****
First posted on 11/4/24