From Booklist
Destitute young Sara Cobb takes a position as governess for one of her least favorite people, the impulsive and spoiled Ileana Brashear, but is warned off by a chance-met fellow traveler, the unsavory but darkly attractive poacher known as Gren Martyn. She subsequently discovers that young women from the area, a desolate region of Cornwall where the principal industry, mining, has collapsed, are disappearing without a trace and that her aristocratic but extremely unpleasant employer, the lecherous Sir Kenneth, may be involved. Butler's newest historical, relying for its setting on the natural landscape rather than on any specific time period in British history, offers several intriguing elements and is very pointed in its treatment of landowners' rights versus the claims of their dependents, the hazards of mining for those working in the pits, and other social issues of the time, while providing a gothic atmosphere and a nonconsummated romance in a darkly impressionistic tale.
Lynne WelchCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
