The Midnight Rose by Lucinda Riley is just the kind of book I like when I want a bit of indulgence, so it was perfect reading for my flight to Luxor to embark on a Nile cruise.

It follows the lives of a motley cast of characters – an Indian businessman who loses his girlfriend through focusing on the wrong things in life and working too hard, an American film star whose engagement has been announced to the world’s press before she has agreed to it, and a reclusive and peculiar Lord of the manor holed-up in a crumbling Dartmoor stately home. And that’s just the modern cast of characters. But as with many other intergenerational sagas I guiltily enjoy so much (as you’ll see from my blog on Hothouse Flower also by Lucinda Riley, as well as blogs on the The Shell Seekers, Shadow of the Moon and On the guilty pleasures of reading a trashy book), it also follows the lives of a cast of characters from 1911 who have mysteries for the modern generation to uncover.

Skipping between Indian and the UK the settings are glorious and Lucinda Riley is a great story-teller. You know from the beginning what has gone wrong, but that doesn’t stop you wanting to know why. And of course you’re rooting for the modern characters not to make the same mistakes as their forebears, which, of course, they don’t. So, all in all, a very satisfying start to some holiday reading.