The Adulteress

Third book in the 100+ reading challenge

The Adulteress
by Philippa Carr (Victoria Holt)

Outer back cover: Zipporah was a quietly respectable woman, happily married to a man she had known all her life. But then she received an unexpected invitation to Eversleigh, the house to which she was heiress, and the sinister, mysterious happenings began...

I didn't actually read the back cover of this book until I had finished reading the book. I had never heard of the author of the book before, and I picked it up at the library only because I thought the title sounded exciting.

Zipporah get's invited to Everleigh by a distant relative, and learns that this relative, Uncle Carl, has a "special" relationship with his much younger housekeeper Jessie. Zipporah can sense there is something more going on there and decides to find out what it is. While Zipporah is at Eversleigh she also meets a very charming French gentleman, whom she after only a short while have an affair with. After being with the Frenchman Zipporah also get's pregnant for the first time.

I'm very much against cheating, and I can't really forgive Zipporah for cheating on her husband with the French guy, but I can kind of understand the way she acts afterwards. I also enjoyed reading about the other characters, although some of them annoyed me, the way they would have annoyed me if they were real.

My favorite part of the book was the parts with Uncle Dave in them. He was a really interesting character. I also liked the parts with Jessie, as I wanted to know what she would come up with.

Several times during the book it kind of felt like the book could have just ended at that point and it wouldn't really have mattered, but I'm glad it didn't. There were new people and plots woven into the story all the time, in a way that made it more exciting and also made me wonder how it all would end.

This book is actually the ninth novel in a series called Daughters of England. I didn't know this when I started reading. Maybe I would have known a little bit more about some of the characters in the book if I had read the other books in the series, but I honestly didn't feel like any information or anything was "missing" from the book when I read it. It was perfectly fine to read on it's own.

This is not the kind of book I would normally read. It wasn't a great book, but it was okay. I don't feel like I need or want to read the other books in the series, but at the same time if I got one of them I wouldn't mind reading it.