I must confess to not having read this, just flipped through it for 10 minutes or so on a charity book stall, deciding whether to buy. I didn’t, for the following reason:
I’m a Bathonian (by over a decade’s residence) and I looked in vain for any sort of local colour in the book. All I could find were a few casual references to nice Georgian houses. Not even as much as a street name. Now I realise you don’t want to baffle people who don’t know Bath, but it wouldn’t be very hard (say) to mention a character strolling down Milsom St, commenting on the outfits on display in the shop windows. The reader would quickly pick up that this is one of the main central streets, with lots of clothes shops. Or setting a scene in an identifiable nearby village – we do a great line round here in rather absurd double-barrelled names (someone once remarked that they sound like the names of lawyers in American TV mini-series). It wouldn’t be parochial to do this, but would make the story more realistic by linking it to actual locations.
I may be unfair and have missed details of this kind, but one could be forgiven for thinking that Wendy Holden hasn’t actually been to Bath and just knows that it’s a place with pretty and rather grand houses where lots of middle-class people live. Even in a piece of chick-lit, this seems casual and sloppy. When some inventors of fictional places go to great trouble to give them a geography, surely it can’t be asking too much of an author to do the same for a real one?