Still love these characters. The secondary characters are also well-drawn and eminently likeable! ( )

Orlando’s broken memory may break his lover’s heart.

Cambridge Fellows Mysteries, Book 3

Cambridge, 1906.

On the very day Jonty Stewart proposes that he and Orlando Coppersmith move in together, Fate trips them up. Rather, it trips Orlando, sending him down a flight of stairs and leaving him with an injury that erases his memory. Instead of taking the next step in their relationship, they’re back to square one. It’s bad enough that Orlando doesn’t remember being intimate with Jonty—he doesn’t remember Jonty at all.

Back inside the introverted, sexually innocent shell he inhabited before he met Jonty, Orlando is faced with two puzzles. Not only does he need to recover the lost pieces of his past, he’s also been tasked by the Master to solve a four-hundred-year-old murder before the end of term. The college’s reputation is riding on it.

Crushed that his lover doesn’t remember him, Jonty puts aside his grief to help decode old documents for clues to the murder. But a greater mystery remains—one involving the human heart.

To solve it, Orlando must hear the truth about himself—even if it means he may not fall in love with Jonty the second time around…

I enjoyed the aspect of the novel about Orlando's memory loss and Jonty's patient attempts to bring his lover's memory back.
But the mystery that they were trying to solve did not capture my attention.
That's why I only gave this one in the series 3 Stars. ( )

I suspect that Charlie Cochrane is a little prude as her character Orlando; and since I like Orlando, don't take this as a complaint, it's only that Charlie Cochrane's books are not notorious to be overly erotic, but more subtly sexy. The first book in the series was almost chaste, with some hints here and there that something was happening between Orlando and Jonty, but not real explicit proofs. In the second book it was expected for them to move on in their relationship, to deepen it... now, don't think that they jumped in bed and replayed the Kamasutra, but well that time something happened.

And in the third book? It's not in the nature of these characters to be daring, or at least not from Orlando's side, and so Charlie Cochrane adopted a trick that Monopoly's players well know, the 'start again' penalty. And so at the beginning of the book, Orlando opportunely suffers from amnesia and Jonty has to start all over again his seduction play. It's indeed a nice play, and I enjoyed all over again the very prim and proper behavior of both characters, not only of Orlando; also Jonty is quite conservative: for example, when he finally manages to have Orlando again in his bed, he lets himself being swerved from his seduction plan for a coughing attack... and all end with both of them in their respective beds in separate not only rooms but even buildings... not exactly the behavior of a man overcome by passion.

But indeed Orlando and Jonty are right like they are, the nice stereotype of the two English professors of the beginning of the XX century, clever and full of knowledge, but maybe too often with their heads on the clouds instead of the ordinary things of life. They are allowed to being in that way since they live in a quite protective environment, the walls of Cambridge. In this case for them those walls are not a 'prison', but their shelter, Cambridge is like a natural reserve where people like Orlando and Jonty can thrive where instead, outside those walls, they would perish. Some of Orlando's behaviors made me want to knock him on the head, but then I realized that I was thinking with a XXI century mind, and instead Orlando, and all his reserves, is the consequence of his upbringing in a very strict late XIX century family; we have to comprehend him and allow him to live in his safe world inside those walls, that are not only the physical walls of Cambridge, but also the mental walls he erected to protect himself, and that maybe are also one of the reasons for his amnesia.

I like also the new mystery they undertake in this new book; if it was another real murder, I would have suspected that Orlando and Jonty were like some unlucky charm, and I would have suggested to people to avoid them to not ending dead... And instead this time their investigation is aimed to resolve a more than 400 years old mystery, an investigation that is led through papers and legends, deciphering codes and making assumptions, some of them during a Christmas holiday spent with Jonty's family, they solve a mystery like modern families play at Cluedo. The mystery this time is more playful and less angst, above all since regarding people long ago dead and not directly involved with the heroes.

The new Cambridge Fellows Mystery confirms to be a nice and enjoyable book, with a very sweet romance, and two endearing characters.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1605047902/?tag=elimyrevandra-20