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Jul 27, 2015ryner rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
As an amateur cryptologist on her way to France to help out a friend-of-a-friend, Sara is focused only on her goal: to successfully decipher the 18th-century diary of young Mary Dundas. Taking up residence as a guest in a local household, Sara gets down to business, resolving Mary's initial cipher with ease. It turns out that Mary has been enlisted to travel from England to France in order to pose as the sister to a young gentleman living in disguise and exile due to a financial situation gone poorly. Sara is surprised at how absorbed she is becoming, both in Mary's life and in her temporary adoptive household, whose own characters are proving to be equally intriguing. I was initially skeptical as it took me a good hundred pages or so to really get into Kearsley's latest tale, but then it revved up and the pages flew like the wind to the end. Sara's relationship with Luc seemed a bit contrived from the start and also too tidily wrapped up at the end, but Mary's story and her own relationships and adventures more than made up for it. Merely the idea of a secret, several-hundred-year-old diary that no one had ever read was enough to captivate this reader.