Ellepkay won a A Perilous Undertaking as a set of CDs, but discovered that she already had a copy. She offered the CDs, and I gladly took her up on her offer. The audio version was about 12 1/2 hours, and I listened to it over two days. It was an entertaining listen. The narrator, Angele Masters, did a good job of portraying the energy of the book.
If it’s set in Victorian London, there must be a salacious sex subplot. We assume, don’t we, that if a society is as sexually repressed as the Victorians claimed to be that they were also pretty kinky. Sexual desires are hard to repress. The more they are repressed, the weirder they get. So the second installment of Deanna Raybourn’s Veronica Speedwell series gets to spend time in the convoluted world of naughty Victorian sex. I appreciated that Deanna Raybourn is not afraid of conveying the female gaze.
The best part of A Perilous Undertaking was spending more time with Veronica and Stoker. They are wonderful characters and I am happy to spend time with them, even though the mystery is a bit thin. Veronica and Stoker are still on a slow burn. They have admitted that there is something special about their relationship, but neither is ready to move beyond that.
Raybourn has a better grasp on Stoker in this installment. Veronica seemed to have sprung fully formed onto the page in A Curious Beginning, but Stoker has taken a little longer to form. The banter between Veronica and Stoker is fun and their friendship feels earned. I’m looking forward to their next adventure.
