Published By: Hera Books
Pages: 320
Released On: 13/11/2025
London, 1835.
To high society, Estella is the perfect lady. But her fair face hides dark secrets – what has she done with her husband? And will her past crimes come back to haunt her?
Desperate to escape her troubled life, she visits her friend, Lady Taykall. But when a servant girl disappears, Estella stumbles on a horrifying web of crimes and feels the old fire for vengeance burning inside her.
To mete out her own brand of dark justice she must risk everything.
Even if it means she cannot survive.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Hera Books for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I LOVED Barbara’s previous book, Estella’s Revenge, and have been excited about this sequel ever since. I’ve said before, as a Dickens obsessive, I can be wary of modern adaptations because I feel they can never live up to the original. But Barbara isn’t trying to live up to Dickens. She is putting her own spin on it, her own voice, whilst maintaining the heart of Dickens. She is the closest to matching the pedestal I put Dickens on.
It has 63 chapters which means they’re relatively short quick chapters which I prefer.
Because I read the first book a while ago, I was worried I’d forget my place. When you read 350+ books a year, it’s impossible to remember everything from every single book just in case there’s a sequel. And yet this held your hand and dragged you back into this world that was instantly familiar.
The first book felt very close to the original work because it had the familiar characters and whatnot, whereas this book is completely anew. It has characters not in the original Great Expectations; it still has the heart of Dickens but with her own story which was nice as it didn’t feel completely like a rewrite. She balanced it well.
There’s a nice couple of Easter Eggs dotted about. I’m not going to say what about, but Dickens fans will enjoy it.
It’s got a bit of everything – there’s history and it’s based off a classic, but it’s also a thriller, with a hint of whodunnit. There’s a lot going on. There’s a lot of very unsavoury subjects and plot lines. It’s not pretty, but in the way that Dickens’ work was also not pretty.
I planned to take my time with this, read it slowly, savour it. But truth be told, I flew through it in a day because I just had to know what happened next.
It ends in a very satisfying way but I do hope she’s got more planned as there’s most definitely scope for at least one more tale, if not more.
Books By Your Bedside 