My Lady Cinderella (as Mrs. C. N. Williamson)

Beautiful young orphan, Consuelo Brand, is rescued from dreary governessing by fashionable and eccentric Lady Sophie de Gretton who means to take her up for a time and work some Cinderella magic. She falls in love with wealthy Sir George Seaforth, who has a secret, and is followed by a sinister heterochromatic solicitor and a socially powerful mother-daughter duo. Who is Consuelo, really, and why do they wish her harm?

Written four years after her more famous The Lightning Conductor (with husband, Charles Norris Williamson), this light romantic mystery reads, oddly, much more Victorian. Consuelo isn't the independent, new girl that Molly is, and her story plays out along more traditional lines -- with nary a motorcar in sight. It's fun enough, though: "if I had only knowns" are thick on the ground, a few years before Mary Roberts Rinehart will embark on her HIBK-defining career, and there are a couple of mildly surprising twists. The weakness of the narrative is that Consuelo, outside of being young and beautiful, isn't especially interesting. I would have almost preferred to hear the story from the POV of her friend, Anne, companion to a difficult woman, who is plain and practical and doesn't get a fairy godmother, or the sophisticated, 40-something Lady Sophie, left penniless after an unhappy marriage and getting by on her wits, chaperoning title-seeking young Americans. Or, hell, their stories, instead. But Williamson writes well, doesn't veer too far into class essentialism, and it's a pleasant, lazy-afternoon read.

Flags: Brief plot point involving minstrel show, with offensive term used for one of the singers. Mild stereotyping of Romany characters. A woman's facial difference (severe small-pox scarring) contributes to her seeming malevolence.