The women wait behind a little wall. It is 1877, in the Mayfair branch of a private bank, and every female customer is penned at the back of the hall until a young attendant escorts her to a cashier, one at a time, while the men walk straight up. Reina Martin has waited most of an hour on a hard chair. The assistant manager then tells her she cannot open an account without a husband, father or some other man to sign beside her. She has no relations in the eyes of the law, and her cheque is worth more than three thousand five hundred pounds. The elegant stranger she dares to come and sit behind the wall with her turns out to own the bank. Queen of Lombard Street by Lisa Kleypas is built on that scene: a brilliant woman, a door that will not open, and a powerful man who seems to want to help her through it.

Nobody’s Child Wants to Be Queen of Lombard Street

Reina is the illegitimate daughter of a banker and a Spanish flamenco dancer, and the prologue shows her at ten, learning what the word for her means from a stranger at a chestnut cart. Kleypas makes her legal status the engine of the book, not a backstory wound. Reina has an LL.B. with first honours and cannot practise. She has made a fortune trading and written a bestselling money guide for women. Now, three years after that day at the bank, she is negotiating with her mentor, William Farlow, to open an all-women branch of his bank in Knightsbridge.

What makes this thread work is how specific it is about money. Reina thinks in savings rates and select committee returns, she spots the growth in companies making bottled gravy and eggbeaters because she knows who buys them, and her objection to marriage is set out like a contract review. The comedy comes from the same place. She smuggles a broken moustache spoon onto her companion’s side of the table at a men-only restaurant so women will not be blamed for it, and she manages a houseful of parolees like a cheerful tour guide. Queen of Lombard Street by Lisa Kleypas lets her be odd, too. She eats from a divided plate, forgets meals and fidgets with her late father’s gold pencil, and the book treats her quirks as information rather than flaws to be cured.

The Butler Who Never Saw Millbank

The second thread arrives in chapter five, in a Manchester pub. John Pembroke is a Welsh detective, worn down by night work, and an assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police asks him to pose as a paroled convict and take a job as butler in Reina’s house. Officially, he is there to learn what she knows about Farlow. Readers of Queen of Lombard Street by Lisa Kleypas know this from the start, so the suspense lies in waiting for Reina to find out.

John is one of her best heroes in years. He grew up in service on a Cardiff estate, was moved below stairs because a guest decided footmen ought to match and his skin was too dark, and has spent his life being asked where he is really from. Reina never asks, and the moment he realises she will not is one of the quietest and best beats in the novel. His first report to his superior arrives with his blunter opinions crossed out and replaced by careful official phrasing, and it is very funny.

The household around them is the novel’s heart. Kleypas gives each former inmate a turn. Norman, a forger who hated every footman’s chore, copies half of Reina’s overdue article for The Economist in a perfect imitation of her handwriting and becomes her secretary. Belinda, fifteen and furious, has fitted a work glove with sharpened horseshoe nails, and the scene where John disarms her and then explains to her who is really the strongest person in the house is the book’s thesis in miniature. Queen of Lombard Street by Lisa Kleypas is at its warmest when these people are failing at being servants and succeeding at looking after each other.

The romance grows out of all that. The pair talk past midnight, dance a bolero at a Spanish community evening in Soho, and keep pretending the rules of service will hold. When they finally talk honestly, the pitch is partnership: he will not be a kept husband, she will not be anyone’s property, and both of them say so out loud.

Where Queen of Lombard Street Gives Ground

• The last act piles up its conveniences. A night watchman who happens to be standing in, a coachman who arrives exactly when needed, a surprise inspection on the worst possible day and a hostile legal visit all land within a few chapters, and the book starts to feel like a farce.
• The title plot settles offstage. The banking thread is why Queen of Lombard Street by Lisa Kleypas exists, yet its consequences arrive mostly in summary. Readers who wanted to see the City reckon with what happened will feel shortchanged.
• One key character changes too abruptly. A figure the novel has drawn with real nuance for three hundred pages is flattened into a shouting cartoon in a single scene, which undercuts the book’s own argument that people are rarely one thing.
• The chapter openings wear thin. Many chapters start with a little essay on memory, elephants or the weather in Wales. Charming early, a habit by the end.

Read These Next

1. Rules for Ruin by Mimi Matthews for another clever Victorian heroine with secrets, espionage and a slow burn.
2. Hello Stranger by Lisa Kleypas, the Ravenels novel in which the surgeon and the Scotland Yard man who turn up here fall in love.
3. Scandal of the Summer by Alexandra Vasti if you want the banter turned up and the stakes turned down.
4. Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore for a Victorian heroine who puts the vote before the duke.

About Lisa Kleypas

Kleypas has spent nearly forty years at the centre of historical romance. Queen of Lombard Street by Lisa Kleypas is a standalone with a few Ravenels faces, and its parolees owe their comedy to the ticket-of-leave system that let Victorian convicts out early on strict conditions.

• She was Miss Massachusetts in 1985 and competed for Miss America, an experience she has said made her wary of writing physically perfect heroines.
• She sold her first novel, Where Passion Leads, before graduating from Wellesley with a political science degree.
• Worth Any Price won her a RITA Award in 2004.
• Her Wallflowers novel Devil in Winter regularly appears on lists of the best romance novels of all time.
• Hallmark adapted her contemporary Christmas Eve at Friday Harbor as the TV film Christmas with Holly in 2012.

What Stays With You

Plenty of historical romances give the heroine a cause. Queen of Lombard Street by Lisa Kleypas gives her a balance sheet, a law degree she is not allowed to use and a man who is prepared to stand behind her rather than in front. The plotting wobbles at the end, and the bank deserved a big scene. But the house on the edge of Mayfair, with its forger, its fifteen-year-old armed with horseshoe nails and its dog who will not sit, is a place you will be sorry to leave.

Queen of Lombard Street by Lisa Kleypas is out now from Avon. Bring it to the bank queue.