The Finest Print is a next-generation love story for those who've read Erin Langston's earlier works, but it will easily stand alone for new readers. Our female main character, Belinda "Belle" Sinclair, is daughter to Gavin and Emilia (Some Winter's Evening) and niece to Nate and Cora (Forever Your Rogue), and at the story's start, we see the trigger of her societal fall: a broken engagement to a power-hungry bore. The fall-out for her is immediate and sustained, and she becomes isolated from friends and society-at-large, forced to carve out unconventional spaces for herself. Now, several years later, she spends the majority of her days tagging along with her father - now a judge - as he presides over cases at the Old Bailey while writing (and relentlessly revising) drafts of her crime novel. Her life has settled into a well-worn, melancholic groove. 

Enter our male main character, Ethan Fletcher, the (bearded and broad) American heir to a struggling print shop. In his return to London, Ethan discovers he's inherited a shocking amount of debt and a rapidly approaching deadline for paying it off. The two meet by chance and learn just enough to discover they could perhaps be useful to one another - where he desperately needs a fast-selling publication to pay down his debt and keep the print shop open, she is desperate to see her stories in print after years of rejection. While his idea to publish a penny blood is, at first, an insult to our budding gothic novelist, the two quickly chart a path forward as partners, and begin publishing serialized crime stories featuring a housemaid-turned-amateur-detective. Their penny blood project brings to life a fascinating few years in the early Victorian era, when the "knowledge tax" (or news tax) made news less accessible to lower/working classes and genre fiction became a more economically viable and widely accessible route to readers. The inner workings of the press, the trials of female writers of the era, and the prevailing attitudes about gothic literature work together to create a compelling and original backdrop to this class difference love story.

For those who know and love Langston's work, it will be no surprise that her prose in The Finest Print is earnest and lush as she shows two people who are equally hurting and healing learn to trust and depend on one another. I've always appreciated how Langston balances power between her main characters, and the dynamic between these two is particularly nuanced - where Belle is socially outcast, she is still monied and secure, and Ethan, while operating from a blank slate, has no familial wealth or foothold in London, and is struggling to establish himself and his business. Their romance is tender, sincere and direct, and they insist on honesty with one another in their work and in their intimacy (and their discussions of birth control and consent are excellent and sexy as heck). This story cemented Langston as one of my favorite historical romance authors writing today. 

Thank you to the author for an advanced reader's copy.