GPL Blog

Book Review | The Matchmaker’s Lonely Heart by Nancy Campbell Allen

From the publisher: London, 1885. A romance develops as a detective partners with a lonely-hearts columnist to solve a murder mystery.

The Matchmaker’s Lonely Heart is an entertaining clean historical romance. It has strong, interesting female characters and a sympathetic hero. The plot takes some unlikely twists, but nothing struck me as outlandish. The book pushes the edges of acceptable behavior for women in 1885 in a believable way and introduces societal issues like street urchins and the institutionalization of people with intellectual disabilities. The bad guy is stereotypical with no nuance, but I didn’t mind too much since the story flirts with being a gothic romance.

Although this book is not listed as the first in a series, there are a lot of side characters who could get their own stories. I look forward to future entries.

I read an advance reader copy of The Matchmaker’s Lonely Heart from Netgalley. The book is scheduled to be published in September 2021, and it will be available for checkout at the Galesburg Public Library.