The True Value of Pearls

by Harriet Smart

After the war, a dangerous legacy... London in 1947: Saskia Harper learns that she has inherited the house in which she grew up. The Seigneurie is set in a remote corner of Brittany, the Cornwall of France, and for Saskia it is a place of enchanted memories. Desperate to escape her troubled life in London, she sets out to claim it. But when she arrives at the ancient manor house, she finds that her inheritance is fiercely disputed. Someone else claims to be the true owner, and all seems lost. Reeling, Saskia is thrown into a chance encounter with a mysterious yet charismatic stranger, Jean-Jacques Sebastien, who has come to Brittany on a desperate quest of his own. Jean-Jacques drags her into the dangerous complexities of post-occupation France, where the wounds of the war have barely begun to heal, and it soon emerges that they have business in common, and far more besides. But as she opens her heart to him, she finds herself struggling to save him from his own dark past. The True Value of Pearls is an emotional, romantic suspense novel in the tradition of Mary Stewart. Harriet Smart is the author of the acclaimed series of historical crime novels, The Northminster Mysteries.

277 pages, Paperback

Published November 30, 2022

Reviews

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel is set in 1947 in England and France. The main character discovers her father has left her his house in France, and since she is caught between a loveless marriage (after losing her first husband during the war) and an equally loveless affair which has left her pregnant, she decides to run away to France. There she accidentally hits a French man on the road, and discovers her house is occupied by a woman who claims to be her father's second wife. The rest of the novel consists of reactions to things that happened during the war and occupation of France. I prefer the author's Northminster Mysteries series, but this was still a book that caught my attention and kept it.