Mr. Montgomery's Quest

Miss Charlotte Pelham needs to earn some money quickly so that she can afford to send her younger brother, Jonathan, to university. And when she reads a newspaper advertisement for an opening as a guide for a walking tour across northern England, she eagerly applies. Charlotte, who is a seasoned trekker, believes that she is truly qualified for the job. However, she also realises that no one will hire a woman for such a job. So that when she applies for the job, she presents herself as 'Charles Pelham.' It is Charlotte's devout hope that she will be able to placate the participants of the walking tour into accepting her as a substitute for her absent 'brother.' And since she has also persuaded her brother Jonathan, as well as his best friend, Peter, to be assistant tour guides, Charlotte is fairly sanguine that she will be able to pull things off. However her enterprise starts off badly when the landlord at the very inn that the tour is supposed to start from refuses to allow Charlotte to stay without her brother 'Charles.' Enter the mysterious Mr. Harrison Montgomery, who smoothes Charlotte's way with the landlord, but who expects Charlotte to include him in her walking group in return. And while Charlotte is grateful to Mr. Montgomery for his aid, his dismissive attitude towards her because of her gender, and the manner in which he forces her to include him in the tour, really grates. She has to keep reminding herself that it is this first walking tour that she is leading that is important, and not the very irritating but vastly attractive Mr. Montgomery. And if she intends for this trek to be a success, she will need to pay attention to everyone in the group, and not just the one person who sends her pulses racing, and whose behavior is mysterious and highly suspicious. Why, for example, is he so interested in Jonathan and Peter? And then a series of minor accidents begin to dog the group. With air positively foggy with mystery, Charlotte begins to wonder if this group is just ill-fated, or if something more sinister is going on, and if the mysterious and infuriating Mr. Montgomery is behind it all?"Mr. Montgomery's Quest" is a really fun read. And I was truly tempted by Martha Kirkland's vivid descriptions of the Cumbria landscape and the Yorkshire moors -- I practically wanted to start out on an English walking tour at once! I liked the character of Charlotte Pelham immensely. Here was certainly a heroine that was not in the usual mode. What a refreshing breath of fresh air Charlotte, with her frank, humourous and intelligent ways, was! It took me a while to warm up to Harrison Montgomery, however. Though this was no fault of his (or the authour's). Being of Indian descent myself, I didn't exactly enjoy the sweeping generalisations he made when comparing Charlotte to the women he had known in India. It was only when I recollected that he probably only had traffic with courtesans (and probably not the cream of the crop either) that I forgave