Tag: 2021

I started off confused; for some reason I had it in my head that this book was going to take place in London and centre around Lord Gage (Kiera’s soon to be father-in-law), so when the story opens in Edinburgh and Lord Gage was nowhere to be found it felt like I picked up the wrong book.

Once I got past that and settled into the story, I enjoyed it, although I had concerns the author was writing herself into a corner: Lord Gage does appear about a third of the way through and boy is he an ass.  Certifiable, no redeeming qualities ass and he doesn’t like Kiera at all.  This set-up felt like a trite attempt at creating a crise de cœur between Kiera and Gage at best, and at worst, a totally unrealistic set-up for Kiera to ‘win-over’ and redeem her future father-in-law.  Either of these scenarios was going to disappoint me after the quality of the story-telling in the first three books.

I should have had more faith; Ms. Huber takes neither of these paths and instead makes the hero more heroic and Kiera’s future more realistic, if less HEA.  Sometimes, you have to take the ass to get the prince.

As to the actual mystery – I liked it a lot!  The author presented several viable suspects and an ingenious method of poison delivery, as well as quite a few red-herrings that didn’t look like red-herrings.  I didn’t sort it out until just before Kiera did and it was someone I never gave a thought to suspecting.  I love it when that happens!

I love this series and of the four published so far there hasn’t been a bad one yet.  It’ll be a long year of waiting to see what happens next.

Not as good as the first two, but only marginally less so, and really only because it took awhile before any of the plot really got moving.  This made the book feel LONG.

Saying that, I don’t know if I’d actually go so far as to claim it would improve with heavy editing.  Perhaps.  But the bulk of the first half of the book does do a very good job of setting the atmosphere, which is bleak and oppressive (does anything cheerful EVER take place on the moors?) and something-is-definitely-not-right-here.

And boy howdy is something not right at Grimsgrave.  Once the story got moving, so did my pulse rate.  The conclusion of the plot left me feeling like I might never be clean again; the author manages to vividly convey a diabolical depravity without celebrating it or wallowing in it, making it possible for people like myself (with a low threshold for such things) to read it without screaming.

Less humor in this one, although the dry wit is still to be found.  Lady Julia is really rather putting it all on the line in this book, and when Brisbane isn’t acting like an arrogant ass, he’s actually acting quite a bit more human, albeit oftentimes I wanted to tell him to get over himself.  His ‘gift’ continues to be a burden that is avoided at all costs and never used; given the times and the cost, this actually makes sense.  Julia’s sister Portia is here too and her life changes rather dramatically during the course of the book.  Brother Valerius reappears but is mostly background.

The ending is all wrapped up rather neatly with a HEA for almost everyone.  I enjoyed it thoroughly and I look forward to starting the next one (although I am taking a break from the series to avoid burnout).

After the longest, driest reading month of my life it was wonderful to fall into this book and lose myself in the story.  I had read Silent in the Grave before leaving for holiday back in May and enjoyed it so much I searched out and ordered the rest of the books in the series, but none of them arrived before I left, leaving me with a feeling of unmet anticipation. Luckily, the sense of anticipation prevailed upon my return.  More fortunately, the story held up and didn’t disappoint.

Lady Julia, after recovering from events in the first book by spending 6 months in Italy with her brothers, is summoned home for Christmas by her father; ostensibly because one of those brothers married without permission.  Of course that had nothing to do with why they were all summoned home, but it does get the story moving.

I loved Julia’s eccentric, dry-witted family from the moment I met them in Silent in the Grave, so I was thrilled this one took place in the bosom of the family asylum, so to speak.  Almost all the key players from book 1 are here, including Brisbane of course, dragging behind him his own contribution to the story’s drama.  The humor in these books is never central to the writing, but it’s subtly woven through the dialogue and often sneaks up on me.  Lady Julia feels (to me, so take this with a grain of salt) appropriate to the time period while being just a little bit shocking, too.  Brisbane is often an ass, but Julia get’s his goat often enough that I don’t hate him.

More than a couple of plots in this one, most of which don’t get sorted out until 2/3 of the way through and I think each was rather competently done – the murder itself included quite a twist that delightfully surprised me.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this one and immediately started reading the 3rd book, Silent on the Moor.

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.

 

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.