A Crimson Warning (Lady Emily, #6)

A Crimson WarningA Crimson Warning
by Tasha Alexander
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780312661755
Series: Lady Emily Mystery #6
Publication Date: August 7, 2011
Pages: 352
Genre: Fiction, Historical, Mystery
Publisher: Minotaur Books

Newly returned to her home in Mayfair, Lady Emily Hargreaves is looking forward to enjoying the delights of the season. The delights, that is, as defined by her own eccentricities—reading The Aeneid, waltzing with her dashing husband, and joining the Women's Liberal Federation in the early stages of its campaign to win the vote for women. But an audacious vandal disturbs the peace in the capital city, splashing red paint on the neat edifices of the homes of London's elite. This mark, impossible to hide, presages the revelation of scandalous secrets, driving the hapless victims into disgrace, despair and even death. Soon, all of London high society is living in fear of learning who will be the next target, and Lady Emily and her husband, Colin, favorite agent of the crown, must uncover the identity and reveal the motives of the twisted mind behind it all before another innocent life is lost.


SO much better than the last one.  Emily has stopped wallowing and is almost the same character I grew fond of in the first two books.  She’s still a bit more obedient than I’d like, but I have to remember this is the Victorian age and no wife would get away with telling her husband to pull his head out of his ass.

Jeremy and Ivy are back in this book too.  Ivy doesn’t do much for me either way, but I do love Jeremy’s wit and silliness.  The author inserts journal entries from Ivy throughout the chapters that honestly added nothing to the story for me.  She did this in her last book, using Emily’s mother-in-law’s journal, and that worked as a way of getting to know the woman in a way we wouldn’t have realistically been able to by relying on the narrative.  But here… meh.

The plot though… the plot was good.  I thoroughly enjoyed this story line and found it extremely relevant given society’s re-discovered fondness for public shaming.  The mystery behind who was behind it all was done well enough; I neither knew who the culprit was nor was I surprised when it was revealed.  The motivation was rather Machiavellian in the end and I enjoyed it.

This one has restored my enjoyment in the series; there are assuredly better examples of its kind out there, but so far this series is holding its own just fine.

Dangerous to Know (Lady Emily, #5)

Dangerous to KnowDangerous to Know
by Tasha Alexander
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 9780312383794
Series: Lady Emily Mystery #5
Publication Date: January 1, 2010
Pages: 306
Genre: Fiction, Historical, Mystery
Publisher: Minotaur Books

I liked this book the least of all 5 books so far.  The series presents a heroine with modern ideas in Victorian times.  She’s rich of course, smart, independent and has a husband who supports these scandalous ideas of equality.  They investigate mysteries together, along with one or two friends they’ve made along the way.  It’s been fun, mostly.

Until this one.  This book would have been about 30% shorter and less irritating if someone had just given Emily a flog at the beginning of the book and told her to have at herself.  Events in the previous book have given her a rude awakening about what equality might mean–rightly enough–but she positively wallowed throughout this book and didn’t begin to resemble the character I’d enjoyed previously.  Colin too was something of an ass.

So, the story lumbered and dragged for me.  I disliked pretty much everybody, and I was certain who the killer was.  But then, towards the end, the last 25%, the story got exciting. I still pretty much disliked everyone, but events picked up pace dramatically and I was quite swept away in the excitement of it all.  Add to that I was totally wrong about who the killer was (although I get points for proximity) and the book raised itself up to 3 stars instead of the two I had planned to give it.

Here’s hoping everyone pulls their sticks out in book 6.

Silent in the Grave (Lady Julia Grey, #1)

Silent in the GraveSilent in the Grave
by Deanna Raybourn
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780778324102
Series: Lady Julia Grey #1
Publication Date: March 1, 2007
Pages: 511
Publisher: Mira

I bought this book because I was quite enjoying Tasha Alexander’s historical mystery series and I’d heard from several corners that this series was even better.  When I received my copy, I was rather taken aback by its size: 500+ pages presented a brick of a mystery and admittedly, it intimidated me enough that it had worked its way towards the bottom of my TBR.

Then, a couple of nights ago the book I was reading wasn’t working for me, and this book started shouting ‘read me!’ so loudly I could hear it down the hallway (not really) and I’m happy to say not only was it monumentally better and more interesting that the one I had been reading, but that the 500 pages fairly flew by.

I’m a little bit in love with the March family; they all sound mad as hatters.  Perhaps that’s a strong way to put it, but they are all decidedly eccentric.  Lady Julia’s subtle, dry humour had me smiling throughout and chuckling outright whenever she talked about The Ghoul (I’m not going to explain The Ghoul – I’ll just say it’s not supernatural – because explaining would ruin it, I think).

But parallel to this delicious humour is a much more confronting murder mystery that starts off very slowly (not boring) and gains momentum as the ending nears.  Readers who are choosing historical mysteries because they tend to stick with sanitised world views are going to be really disappointed; this book delves into the less conventional and seedier sides of Victorian society.

I’ve already indicated my affection for Lady Julia and her family.  The only other real main character is Nicholas Brisbane and I’m not quite sure what to think of him.  He makes a good hero of the alpha sort, I suppose, and he’s certainly a ‘still-waters-run-deep’ character, but while I didn’t dislike him, the author never really showed me anything particularly likeable about him either.  Tragic, yes, attractive, yes. Warmth and humour….notsomuch.  Still, intriguing potential.

The murder mystery was good, although I had guessed the villain long before the denouement.  The author did get me to flip suspects for a few brief pages, but ultimately I went back to my first guess.  I don’t know if it was because of this, but the actual climatic scene felt oddly anti-climatic.  Maybe rushed?  I suspect there might have been a nuance or two I missed and a couple of small unanswered questions kept that scene from working for me.

 

Am I supposed to think that he was always psychopathic and just hid it really well, or that his behaviour at the last was a result of the syphilis?  Did he start out good or was he always bad?

INSERT SPOILER TAG HERE

Made no real matter though; the story was thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish and I’m looking forward to acquiring the next books.  Another new series!

Vision in Silver (The Others, #3)

Vision in SilverVision in Silver
by Anne Bishop
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780451465276
Series: The Others #3
Publication Date: March 3, 2015
Pages: 400
Genre: Fantasy, Urban Fantasy
Publisher: NAL Hardcover

 

This book wasn’t quite as engrossing as the first two, which is both bad and good.  There’s nothing like getting sucked into a book so thoroughly you lose all sense of time and place as it pertains to reality.  But books like that can be exhausting, and I wasn’t disappointed that I was able to put Vision in Silver down long enough to eat and sleep.  That’s not to stay my husband didn’t get an ‘I will hurt you’ glare whenever he attempted to interrupt my reading.

In each of the first two books, the stories each centered on one big, mounting crisis that resulted in a showdown towards the end between humans and others.  This book felt more like a bridge used to setup a much larger conflict that will carry through into future books.  We get a lot of information (sometimes repetitively – a first for this series), a lot of background and learn more about how the hierarchy of the others works.  We find out what the HFL’s larger purpose is, although I don’t understand how any human with a brain in their heads thought they would accomplish it.  We’re also given reason to think that perhaps not all the cassandra sangue are doomed to a life of cutting.

I frankly missed seeing the Elementals bring down their wrath, although Fire was impressive as a character.  The final conflict in this book sneaks up on you; there’s not really any build up to it at all, and the results of that conflict are rather anticlimactic compared to the first two books, but the result of the others finding out what humans have been doing to each other in order to defeat the others leaves a curious tension for future books:  no pressure on the Lakeside community or anything.  Nope, no pressure at all.

Anybody hear anything about the fourth one yet?  😉

[PopSugar 2015 Challenge: A Book with a color in the title.]

All the President’s Menus (White House Chef Mysteries, #8)

All the President's MenusAll the President's Menus
by Julie Hyzy
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780425262399
Series: White House Chef Mystery #8
Publication Date: January 6, 2015
Pages: 294
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime

Due to a government sequester, entertaining at the White House has been severely curtailed. So executive chef Olivia Paras is delighted to hear that plans are still on to welcome a presidential candidate from the country of Saardisca—the first woman to run for office—and four of that nation’s top chefs.

But while leading the chefs on a kitchen tour, pastry chef Marcel passes out suddenly—and later claims he was drugged. When one of the visiting chefs collapses and dies, it’s clear someone has infiltrated the White House with ill intent. Could it be an anti-Saardiscan zealot? Is the candidate a target? Are the foreign chefs keeping more than their recipes a secret? Once again, Olivia must make sleuthing the special of the day…


A good read, though not as good as the previous four books.  This time Olivia is dealing with a conspiracy tied to a foreign delegation of chefs as well as a government sequester that has left her short a couple of chefs.

I really enjoy Ms. Hyzy’s writing; she doesn’t write to formula and she has interesting ways of changing up her characters’ lives.  She’s dropped a bomb into Olivia and Gav’s marriage that I can see massive possibilities for taking the series in a whole new direction at some point in the future.  I liked that a lot.  I can see Cyan’s future dovetailing nicely with this change as well.  Nothing might come of any of it but at least she has a veteran cozy reader speculating about the “what if?”’s instead of yawning and thinking “yeah, yeah, cozy plot #4”.

I suspect I didn’t love this one as much as previous books because a lot of it centered around a country that the author necessarily had to fabricate and she did such a good job of creating it without aping any existing countries that it made it rather hard for me to invest myself in it.  But the ending was great – I loved that final scene at Blair House (although Olivia’s final scene with the President wasn’t much of a surprise to me; it seemed the only plausible scenario).

The series started off slow for me, but exploded onto my top 10 list at book four, and this book only solidifies my attachment to Olivia, Gav and the rest of the crew.  I’m looking forward to the next book.

A Grave Matter (Lady Darby Mystery #3)

A Grave MatterA Grave Matter
by Anna Lee Huber
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9780425253694
Series: A Lady Darby Mystery #3
Publication Date: July 1, 2014
Pages: 421
Genre: Fiction, Historical, Mystery
Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime

Well rats.

It’s over.  I wasn’t ready for it to be over.

A Grave Matter is a mystery first, but almost equally it’s a romance as things come to a head between Lady Darby and Sebastian Gage.  Ms. Huber will always hold a special place in my heart for not dragging this out past the point of painful into inanity.  There’s plenty of conflict between these two but it avoids most of the overused tropes and these two are actually gasp honest and communicative!

I thought the setting fabulously descriptive, although ironically, Edinburgh was the hardest of the locations for me to picture.  The border villages and the Abbey were crystal clear and I could hear the frost crackling under their feet as they transversed the graveyards looking for evidence.  I found myself reading aloud to MT about the first-footers and I was thrilled at the end of the story to read the author’s note about the authenticity of this tradition.  I’m wondering if I can get away with introducing it at our NYE festivities this year.

The plot is delightfully macabre; not scary or graphic and completely fitting with Lady Darby’s background and baggage.  I’ll admit I nabbed the bad guy early on, but I can’t say what gave it away.  Nevertheless, I was never absolutely certain.  I wouldn’t have been surprised had I been wrong.

There might have been some anachronistic narrative; I can’t say for certain, and I think it was almost all in the internal dialogue.  While women for millennia have probably wished at one time or another to throw things at men, it feels too modern when Lady Darby ‘contemplated throwing a shoe at his head.’  I don’t care about this, but others might find it jarring.

But the scene at the end between Lady Darby and Gage made even this pragmatic non-romantic feel a bit mushy.  Considering the chasteness of the period, Ms. Huber is very good at conveying romantic tension.  (To be fair, there’s a LOT of kissing going on; I’m betting more than considered acceptable for the time period.  Go Lady Darbry!)

There are a lot of things I could blather on about that I enjoyed; a GR friend is just now starting The Anatomist’s Wife and I’m more than a little jealous – I wish I had 2 and a bit of these books still ahead of me.  As it is, I’ll be waiting a very long year to catch up with Lady Darby and Gage.

Mortal Arts (Lady Darby Mystery #2)

Mortal ArtsMortal Arts
by Anna Lee Huber
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9780425253786
Series: A Lady Darby Mystery #2
Publication Date: March 9, 2013
Pages: 384
Genre: Fiction, Historical, Mystery
Publisher: Berkley

No sophomore slump here.  An excellent tale of murder and the evils that men do, that takes place in early 19th century Scotland.

After the events that transpired in The Anatomist’s Wife, Lady Kiera Darby is pulling herself together.  She’s no longer trying to disappear amongst the furniture.  She’s stronger, more willing to stand up for herself and others.

Sebastian Gage is unchanged, although in this book we see more of his true feelings come out – eventually.  He’s starting to open up, but more like a box whose lid hinges have rusted shut and must be worked open, bit by bit, as opposed to a jammed lid that springs open and starts gushing the box’s contents.

That was a horrible metaphor.  I hated creative writing in school, and now it’s clear why.  It’s also clear to me that we’re in for the long haul if we want to see Kiera and Gage together; this is not going to be some combustible romance, but a love that is going to build up over time, tears, and insults, as well as mutual respect and trust that is earned.  With a few kisses thrown in to keep the pulse rate up.

There’s a mystery and a story in this book – at 370 pages there’s room enough for both.  Lady Darby and her family are en route to Edinburg when they are asked to make a stop on the way, to the home of an old friend from Keira and Alana’s childhood (who also happens to be a uni mate of Alana’s husband).  Upon arriving they discover the Lord of the manor, William, missing and presumed dead for the last decade, has been found and rescued from an insane asylum his father secretly committed him to.  William was, at one time, Keira’s art tutor as well as childhood chum; a war hero she had secretly worshipped.  She is invested in doing whatever she can to see him mended.

The book’s mystery, in my opinion, takes a bit of a back seat to the larger story here.  Mortal Arts is also a narrative about the horrors of war, the damage it does to the men fighting it, and the further damage that can happen when the people who are supposed to love them misunderstand the effects on those returning home.  Battle fatigue, shell-shock, PTS, PTSD – whatever name it’s given by whatever generation suffers it, it’s all the same.  We get a front seat view of the damage both the war and the asylum have done to William.  Unless you read a lot of horror, or other graphic fiction, I dare say the scene when Kiera sees William again for the first time is one that will leave an impression, if not raise the hair on your arms.  Ghastly and horrific.  But not really graphic in it’s details – the author allows the reader’s imagination to add the colour and detail (or not) to many of the descriptions.

The mystery surrounds the disappearance of a girl in the village – could William, who’s still suffering ‘episodes’ stemming from the horrors of his incarceration, have been responsible?  Kiera refuses to believe it’s possible for William to hurt any female, but evidence comes to light that he may have murdered a young woman while at the asylum – a fellow ‘resident’ of the facility.  Kiera and Gage agree to investigate the missing woman and find out what really happened before deciding William’s fate.  It’s a good mystery, but not a great one, since I think it’s a rather narrow field of suspects and little doubt as to where the true perpetrator lies.  It’s more about establishing for a fact, William’s innocence and finding evidence that can stand up in legal proceedings.  Because there’s so much else going on, the mystery itself also loses a bit of urgency, but I didn’t mind, as caught up as I was in the other dramas.

The ending was heart-wrenching; no tears, (thank god, I hate crying over books!) but definitely a bit of melancholy when I closed the book.  I found Lady Darby’s reaction to the aftermath felt authentic; I think I would have reacted in much the same manner had I found myself having to suffer similarly.

The last page ends with portents of future investigations and strong use of foreshadowing, which I normally hate, but since I know the third book’s publication date is coming up, I’m not as irritated as I might be.  It’s already on my list of books to buy for July and I’m relieved to see there will be at least two books beyond that; colour me hooked on this series.

The Anatomist’s Wife (A Lady Darby Mystery #1)

The Anatomist's WifeThe Anatomist's Wife
by Anna Lee Huber
Rating: ★★★★
Series: A Lady Darby Mystery #1
Publication Date: February 1, 2016
Pages: 357
Genre: Fiction, Historical, Mystery
Publisher: Berkley

I read about this book recently here on BookLikes and the combination of the review and the title grabbed my attention enough that I went right out and ordered the book.  I received it this week, and it became my Friday-after-Thanksgiving-and-I’m-not-moving read.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book – at least, I enjoyed it as much as I could considering the murder (this murder isn’t for the feint of heart or those that like their murders cozy – this was gruesome).  This is an example of the type of historical mysteries that hook me; I can get behind these characters and care deeply about what happens to them.

The main character is Kiera, Lady Darby.  She’s the widow with a scandalous, somewhat tragic past.  But not in the typical, clichéd way; I like what the author has done to create this character and to me, it’s very unique.  There’s a bit of wounded bird to her personality, justifiably so, but there are moments where she gives as good as she gets and those moments are gold.  Her sister Alana is fantastically likeable and it’s a breath of fresh air to read a book about sisters who like each other;  I’ve rather been on a run of books with nasty-shrew sisters recently.

Gage, the inquiry agent is perfect for a series worth of fun sexual tension and witty banter. Blond/blue eyed, gorgeous, intelligent and a rogue.  The scenes with Gage and Keira are sometimes fun, oftentimes sweet and always leaving me wanting to read more.  I love that Keira is a widow, we get to skip all that innocent-lamb-must-be-chaperoned stuff that comes with women who’ve not yet been married.

The rest of the characters are all vividly written and easy to distinguish, although I’ll admit at first to being worried about keeping all the Lords, Marquis, and Earl’s straight.  Luckily, in such a large house party, only a handful were serious suspects and it became much easier to keep them all straight.

As to the murder plot, I never had any idea who it was.  It wasn’t just a matter of who wanted the victim dead, but who would go to such lengths?  This wasn’t a run-of-the-mill murder.  I didn’t start to put it all together until Keira did, and that’s always fun when it happens.  I don’t mind guessing early if the characters are worth reading about, but not figuring it out until I’m supposed to?  Well that’s just the best possible outcome for a murder mystery.

My only beef with the plot:

View Spoiler »

Overall, this was a great book and I’ve already ordered the second in the series.  I couldn’t put it down even though I was exhausted from holiday revelry the day before, so I still stayed up too late last night because I had to know how it ended.  I can’t wait for the next one to arrive.

How did Gage, Phillip and the rest of the rescue party know that Lord Stratford took the three women out into the loch?  I don’t see how Gage had time to find Keira’s note, trace her movements, figure out about the boat, run back and organise another boat and a rescue party, all in time to make that final showdown scene work.  It fails the logic test.

INSERT SPOILER TAG HERE

Overall, this was a great book and I’ve already ordered the second in the series.  I couldn’t put it down even though I was exhausted from holiday revelry the day before, so I still stayed up too late last night because I had to know how it ended.  I can’t wait for the next one to arrive.