Strange Recompense

by Catherine Airlie

She didn’t even know her own name!
Panic gripped her at the realization–she had lost her memory!
Confusion and loneliness threatened to overwhelm her….Then she came under the care of Dr. Noel Melford, a kind, handsome man who fought to restore her awareness while making no secret of his increasing attraction to her. She felt drawn to him, but dare she let herself fall in love? What about the gold wedding band among her possessions?

Genres: Harlequin Romance

222 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1952

About the author

Jean Sutherland MacLeod was born in 20 January 1908 in Glasgow, Scotland, UK. She was the daughter of Elizabeth Allen and John MacLeod. Her father, who was a civil engineer, moved with jobs. Her education began at Bearsden Academy, continued in Swansea and ended in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She moved to North Yorkshire, England to marry with Lionel Walton on 1 January 1935, an electricity board executive, who died in 1995. They had a son, David Walton, who died two years before her. She passed away on 11 April 11 at 103 years.

Jean S. MacLeod started writing stories for the magazine The People's Friend, before sold her first romance novel in 1936. She wrote contemporary romances, most of them were set in her native Scotland, or in exotic places like Spain or Caribbean, places that she normally visited for documented. From 1948 to 1965, she also published under the pseudonym of Catherine Airlie. She published her last novel in 1996, a year after her husband death. She was member of the Romantic Novelists' Association, where she met the mediatic writer Barbara Cartland, who was not too friendly.

Reviews

[Naksed · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mary Sue is found wandering on the moors, all bruised up and helpless and amnesiac. She is taken in by a handsome doctor who falls violently in love with her, and she with him. The doctor's head nurse is a fang-toothed viper who keeps hissing venomously at heroine, convinced that Mary Sue is just a little tart on the make, pretending a memory loss so she can snag herself a rich doctor husband.

If it wasn’t bad enough to read about the OW who gets so many pages and even her own pov in certain chapters, but absolutely no comeuppance other than “losing” the hero to Mary Sue, I also had to contend with the heroine’s sister: an unhinged mass of neurosis, rage, jealousy, and homicidal potential who would have happily let her sister rot in amnesiac limbo forever and only very reluctantly accepted her back into the fold, at the insistence of the hero.

Basically, the heroine's sister thought that heroine had run off with sister's fiance. What really happened was that the sister's fiance was getting cold feet (because he realized how psychotically jealous and possessive the sister was) and the heroine met up with him to beg him not to jilt her sister. They were driving around , he tearfully pouring his heart out and her trying to convince him to give another chance to her sister, when their car crashed, falling off a cliff, and he died. She was ejected from the car before the fall over the cliff and survived but lost her memory. The psycho sister was convinced the heroine had run off with her fiancé so she made their father disown her and never bothered to find out why heroine never came back home, wrote, or called after her supposed elopment with her sister's fiance. These deadbeat father and daughter just wrote their family member off, she was DEAD to them. That’s why there were no missing person reports when poor Mary Sue was found wandering around after her brush with death and it took such a long time to trace her origins.

What a bleak, depressing little tale! I felt the worst about psycho sis’ dead fiancé, seemingly a nice if weak bloke who should have been given a chance at life once he has extricated himself from the clutches of that bunny boiling lunatic. I can’t even blame him for jilting her or using his would-be sister-in-law as a go-between to deliver the break-up news. If he had confronted her face to face, it’s likely she would have mowed him down with her tractor and fed his mashed remains to her pigs. At least, he died a more elegant and hopefully quicker and less painful death when his car leapt over that cliff and fell into the sea that he had loved so much :~{

[Margo · Rating 2 out of 5]

The h has amnesia and ends up living with the doctor and his sister while she recovers. How on earth could that be considered to be appropriate, even then? Or in the olden days was it normal for handsome doctors to move you into their home (for "constant observation") until you recovered from your psychological distress? This has never happened to me, and I blame Obamacare.

[MissKitty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good enough story. The author does a good job about keeping up the mystery with the amnesia aspect. However, it seems like she invented her own medical practices and procedures for dealing with amnesia. But if you can get over that aspect of it. The story is interesting enough.

The heroine is found walking in a daze so she is rescued by a kind lady who is the sister of a doctor (H). They take care of her in their home despite the insistence of a jealous OW, who is a nurse, who wants her to be under the care of the hospital (actually agree w her). A wedding ring was found in the purse of the heroine, so they all assume she is married. The hero soon falls in love with the heroine to the consternation of the evil OW, since she has had her eye on the hero for some time. She makes life unpleasant for the heroine in several little ways.

Instead of hiring a detective, the hero in his capacity as her doctor, takes it upon himself to try and look for clues to her identity. Strangely, it is the OW who finds her family and finds out that she is estranged from them because she (h) ran away with her sister's fiancé and married him. OW can't wait to get back and gloat to the Hero about this. The hero and his sister refuse to believe this of the heroine, who is kind and sweet. They all go to confront the family and it is there that the heroine regains her memory.

The fiancé was having second thoughts, she leaves to try and convince him to go back to her sister. She took her mother's wedding ring along to give to him. Since she couldn't convince him, he had agreed to drive her back to her hotel when they got into an accident. The heroine jumped from the car and was saved but got amnesia. The car fell off a cliff into the sea so the fiancé is dead. In the end the she is reconciled with her family and the H, who has been tormented this whole time by her married status, is now ecstatic at finally being able to have her.

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 Stars

I'm a sucker for amnesia stories especially when well written and this one by Ms. Airllie. The hero's sister Ruth finds the confused Anna walking on the road and immediately knows that something tragic has happened. Her brother, Noel is a doctor and just the one to sort this. Anna remembers waking early at dawn with a sense of urgency needing to walk to safety, but doesn't really know where it was that she'd woken up. It seems that all memory has deserted hurt prior to be discovered by Ruth. There's something special about Anna and Noel quickly realizes that he's falling in love with his patient, yet he cannot abandon her to another doctor's care. The fly in the ointment is a wedding ring and fears that Anna has commitments that she cannot remember.

Anna and Noel's journey to HEA is one fraught with fears and uncertainty and one conniving other woman who has ambitions to have Noel for herself. I would have loved more of a comeuppance for said other woman, but alas just her knowing she lost will have to suffice!

Even here, high up on the treacherous coast road, the car did not slacken speed, plunging on through the rain and darkness in the shadow of the Welsh mountains to an unknown destination with the wind whipping away the sound of it again and again until, with a screeching of brakes, it appeared to rear, arrested, like a terrified animal, before it plunged over the cliff into the angry sea below.

In that split second, as the dark shape hung suspended before that final plunge to oblivion, a figure was flung clear to lie, crumpled and still, on the coarse grass topping the headland. Wind and rain blew over it, a woman’s figure, thin and pathetically ill-clad for such a night, lying face downwards on the grass without movement, without any sign of life whatever.

[Lucy · Rating 2 out of 5]

read for uni

This was ok, my first 2-star romance in a while, and purely because it was genuinely refreshing to see a romance that wasn’t centralised around the heroine. The hero got a lot of ‘screen time’ and I thought that made the romantic pining better. I thought the reveal was eh, but I genuinely didn’t hate this.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well I do love a good amnesia story and I thought this one had a lot going for it. It was certainly a page turner. Not sure how the heroine managed to be almost without an accent in her voice though, given her family background lol.