Kingfisher Morning

Kingfisher Morning is a 1977 romance by Charlotte Lamb, published by Mills & Boon. It was written for the category-romance readership the publisher built its list on: a short novel, a single point-of-view heroine, one central relationship and a plot small enough to resolve inside its length. The premise begins with a scholar's errand and turns into domestic work, which is the kind of ordinary pivot these books use to place a woman in a household she does not belong to.

Emma is meant to be researching Thomas Hardy in Dorset. Instead she ends up minding the three Hart children while their mother is in hospital, a job she finds more enjoyable than she anticipated. The obstacle is Ross, the children's uncle, whose disapproval she feels at every turn and who has already been described to her, by someone else, as a male chauvinist of the worst sort. She sees no reason to argue with the assessment.

Around that friction the novel sets a second thread: something unexplained in a family that looks content from the outside, and a connection to a figure named Leon Daumaury who stays in the shadows. The book therefore works as a romance with a mild puzzle attached, a common pairing in the line. The English edition is recorded with no ISBN attached, and the shelf subjects describe it simply as a contemporary romance.