Review
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Title: Protecting Her Heart
Author: Nancy Campbell Allen
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Genre: Fiction – Proper Romance
Year Published: 2024
Pages: 282
Binding: Audio/Paper/e-Book
ISBN: 9781639931699
Reviewed by Monya Baker for the Association for Mormon Letters
“I will never come between you and your career.” This is among the declarations of love that surprised me in Protecting Her Heart, a novel by Nancy Campbell Allen. I wouldn’t have expected it from a Victorian gentleman. Nor as a Mormon woman coming of age in the early 90s (and leaving shortly thereafter), did I expect it from an imprint of Deseret Books. I well remember Spencer W. Kimball’s advice that a woman’s life devoted to anything besides homemaking was both selfish and a danger to civilization. It’s nice to see Victorian-era fiction that changes with the times.
In Proper Romance, there is no better way for characters to fall in love than solving a mystery together. This begins on the very first page with a letter to Protecting’s protagonist, Charlotte Duvall, newly graduated from medical school in the US in 1889. (She is also one of the headstrong Hampton cousins who have been featured in other books by the same author.) Upon getting an alarming request from her ailing father in England, she books passage home determined to untangle insinuations about her mother’s death two decades earlier.
Alas, the anticipated reunion and explanation is swapped for a funeral as Charlotte loses both her father and ready source of answers. Eager to help is John, Charlotte’s admirer and director of London’s police force. A hidden stash of letters and journals suggests Charlotte’s mother’s admirers were many and her parents’ relationship more complicated than she realized. Charlotte takes a job at a charity hospital as she chases down a series of clues, unearthed at a steady pace from secret compartments, long-lost autopsy reports, and gumshoe interviews. An escalating succession of threats and worse arrive as well, starting with Charlotte being roughed up in an alley and told to leave the past alone. The incident also invites John to stay ever by her side.
The arcs of romance and mystery regularly interrupt each other to heighten tensions. A parade of amusing, easy-to-hate suspects marches by, and the gears of the story move like clockwork, as the protagonists reluctantly admit their feelings to themselves, their friends, and finally to each other. Meanwhile, John’s powerful, wealthy father threatens to cut funds for police work should John continue the inadvisable association, and Charlotte knows that agreeing to marriage means forsaking employment as a doctor, as the few London hospitals that do employ women would never hire a married one.
I enjoyed period details, such as cutting-edge technologies of fingerprinting, headache powder, and handwashing. Still, despite the handy reticules and horse-drawn omnibuses, the likable characters felt disappointingly modern to me and the villains flat. Either a character is completely comfortable with women being doctors, or they are petty, selfish, and inclined to hire assassins to dispatch their enemies. The heroes are enlightened people moving through a flawed world. This leads to tough choices, but without any need to wrestle internal demons or confront fatal flaws. Everything turns out well because of our heroes’ cleverness (and lucky connections).
That said, Protecting Her Heart’s denouement is delightful, particularly the conceit through which villains and witnesses are brought to confession. I have high hopes for further adventures for the ladies of independent means.