A Time Traveler's Masquerade

By: Sian Ann Bessey

Narrated by: Billie Fulford-Brown, Paul Fox

Romance blossoms when Isla Crawford steps into McQuivey’s Costume Shop in London and is swept back in time to 1605, where she and Lord Bancroft attempt to thwart Guy Fawkes’s Gunpowder Plot.

One moment, Isla Crawford is inside McQuivey’s Costume Shop trying on a Jacobean-style gown for the parliamentary Autumn Ball, and the next, she is standing in an unfamiliar garden, barefoot, coatless, and at the mercy of a fierce storm. Confused, she seeks refuge in a Tudor manor, where she discovers that she has inexplicably traveled back to 1605, mere weeks before the culmination of Guy Fawkes’s infamous Gunpowder Plot. Simon Hartworth, Lord Bancroft, finds his orderly seventeenth-century life disrupted when a mysterious woman appears on his sister’s doorstep during a storm. Intrigued by the stranger’s quirks and bewildering speech, he feels compelled to protect her and heed her warnings about a fatal conspiracy against Parliament. As Simon is drawn into Isla’s dangerous scheme to stop the evildoers, he can’t help but also feel drawn to her. With seemingly no way to get back home, Isla uses her twenty-first-century knowledge of the past to try to thwart Guy Fawkes and his coconspirators without altering the course of history forever. She and Simon must race to unravel the threads of the treasonous plot even as they wonder how their hearts will navigate their deepening connection and the seemingly insurmountable four centuries that separate their lives.

©2025 Sian Ann Bessey (P)2025 Shadow Mountain Publishing

Great story, but male narrator was too slow

I had to switch playback speed to 1.25 every time the male narrator began speaking, but the female narrator was great! And Sian wrote a remarkable story as always! Love her books!

Nice, clean and wonderful history.

I did love the history. It seemed very well researched and I liked the effort on the language of era.

Great Story!

I always enjoy Sian Bessey’s books, this one had a fun time travel twist. Loved the ending!

Great Story

“A Time Traveler’s Masquerade” is a wonderful story to read, but I will not recommend it to listen from an audiobook! Sian Ann Bessey is one of my favorite authors and I have enjoyed several of her books that she has written. She has written an interesting story which would be very enjoyable to read, but I listened to an audiobook of “A Time Traveler’s Masquerade.” I did not like the two narrators that did the narration for this book. It made it difficult to listen to and to keep following the story. There were many reasons that I did not like the quality of the narration of the audiobook and I hope that she finds different narrators for her future books. The narration made the book difficult to enjoy. I would not recommend listening to the audiobook for this story, but I believe that it would be very enjoyable to read.

Gun Powder

Great book. Loved the characters, their growing relationships, & the plot. Ending a bit too abrupt. Narration not great. Speeding it up to 1.5 helped.