Reviewed by Dan
TITLE: Scent of Lilies
AUTHOR: Sarah Ash
PUBLISHER: Manifold Press
LENGTH: 300 Pages
RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2019
BLURB:
Gabriel wants to be an artist. His father wants grandsons. His teacher wants refuge. And the ghost of a young woman who drowned for love of one of his ancestors wants revenge. When events spiral out of control Gabriel heads to Constantinople, but his past is not far behind.
Damian isn’t sure what he wants. He doesn’t want his father’s business, whatever his stepbrother thinks. He doesn’t want his betrothed even though she may still want him. But he does want beauty, and he may find that in the yet to be consecrated church of Saint Thekla, a personal project of the Emperors. But is it in the painting he will find beauty, or the painter?
REVIEW:
Scent of Lilies was on our author request list at Love Bytes and I picked up on the ghost aspect and that it was set in Constantinople and it sounded interesting, so I gave it a go.
I’m going to say that I didn’t love it, but I didn’t dislike it either. It balanced in the middle somewhere for me. I felt for the characters. I was shocked when one main character died, and then there was the ghost and how her story played out. Death seemed to play a pretty big role in this story, and it might be because of when the story was set. There were still Emperors in Constantinople and the church was a powerful force.
We meet Gabriel, the son of a Bulgarian lord and quickly learn that Gabriel isn’t all his father desired in a son. He has a brother who is the chosen son. But there is a family curse. A ghost in the nearby lake, that is somehow tied to the family’s history. We don’t find out until almost the end of the book what the true story of Tekla is and what happened to her. I was disappointed in that aspect. I think it would have helped the story to know more about the ghost sooner in the story.
The story progressed at a steady pace, and along the way there is not only the death of that young woman in the past, there is the death of a lover, a brother, a best friend and a couple of off page characters who were friends of the best friend. Lots of death. There is also the young man who threw himself out of a castle tower window. The central part of the story is the mystery of the ghost and the painter Damian meets in Constantinople. I figured out quickly who the painter was, and I think the reader was supposed to.
Overall, I think the story kept me reading because I wanted to know what would happen to the two young men and the ghost. I was happy with how things worked out.
RATING: 
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