The blurb inside the front cover of Lavender Morning (published in 2009) sounded intriguing. It promised to be a romance with a large amount of interesting mystery and surprises to be worked through before coming to a conclusion.

The Prologue confused me. It had one of the characters from the blurb, Miss Edi, intimately conversing with a person called Helen, promising to meet together in the next few days. It went on to mention numerous other characters and it had me wondering how everyone fit together. I even checked the blurb at the front, twice, to confirm to myself what and who the story was supposed to be about. Things became clearer as Chapter One progressed, but I had found that the confusing Prologue had interrupted the flow of my reading initially.

I particularly enjoyed the flashbacks to earlier parts of Miss Edi’s life that were revealed in bits and pieces so that the jigsaw started to come together. In some ways her story did overshadow the story of the current characters, but that was okay, as it became clearer how their stories were so intertwined.

What wasn’t okay with me, was what I considered to be a significant loose end that didn’t get dealt with by the finish of the book. Starting in the Prologue, then all throughout the book as events and connections from the past were revealed, was the mention of Miss Edi and her connection to a man called Alex, who knew certain things about her from her past. Their connection, and what Alex knew about Miss Edi, kept being mentioned, right up to the end of the book. On the second last page of the book, when things were resolved with the current characters, there’s the suggestion that we’ll discover what the secret was, as one character was going to ask their relative about it. It didn’t happen. So, this secret that was alluded to throughout the whole book, didn’t end up being revealed. To me, that’s an unsatisfactory ending.

Then I discovered that Lavender Morning was actually the first book of the Edilean trilogy. So I looked up some reviews about the next two books, as I was eager to look into acquiring them so I could continue reading about the story that had been built up. I was disappointed.

The second book, Days of Gold, was about people from a few generations before, and how the township of Edilean came into being. It wasn’t going to provide information about Alex and Miss Edi’s secret.

The third book, Scarlet Nights, like the first novel, was again set in Edilean in contemporary times. From what I’ve read about the book, its story was based on what happened between two of the secondary characters from the first novel, and introduced a new main character. So it seemed to be an independent book in its own right, that just happened to be set in the familiar setting of the town of Edilean. It’s highly unlikely it would be following up on what didn’t get answered in Lavender Morning.

So, despite my confusion with the beginning of the book, I enjoyed Lavender Morning enough to want more of that story. However, that’s not what Jude Deveraux provided in the following two books.