Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review.
Okay, first, I’m going to take the chance here that I’m going to sound ungrateful, but I mean this in the spirit of genuine feedback. Only giving out a PDF file for your ARC does not really encourage readers. It is very hard to read, limiting the devices on which it can be read. I could only read on my phone, which is a guaranteed recipe for not getting me to actually read something. To finish this book, I actually purchased it on pub day via audio and abandoned the ARC I had been given for free because the reading experience on it was so bad.
The audiobook was very well done, though! And I do prefer audio to e-books when there is the chance of that.
So this book was good and I liked it, but spoilers for the rest of this review, it didn’t live up to the title, which was going to be my metric on whether or not it got bumped up to four stars. Maude’s revenge was indeed revenge, but I wouldn’t call it glorious. More like mostly competent.
Maude Horton’s Glorious Revenge is a historical fiction novel set in Victorian England, when public hangings were public entertainment, people were still trying to find the Northwest Passage, and the British Empire was in its heyday. Maude’s sister Constance disguises herself as a boy and joins an expedition to find the lost ships the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus*, and when her ship returns to England, she’s not on it. She was killed, and no one will tell Maude how or why. Her body, still dressed in its boy’s clothes, was left in the Arctic. Maude decides to find out what happened to her sister and do something about it. When her efforts bring her a journal her sister kept while on board, she soon targets the very likely culprit: a man named Edison Stowe, who has recently started a business arranging tours for the wealthy to hangings all across Britain.
*The shipwreck remains were finally found in 2014, and basically all the crew starved to death because the ships were caught in ice floes that wouldn’t melt. Dude, they found body parts in cooking pots. It got brutal.
The book is told in alternating chapters from Maude, excerpts from her sister’s journal, and from the killer himself, who in a nice touch, never thinks of Constance (Jack, as he knew her) at all. The journal bits were very interesting, seeing Constance in peril, but also seeing the details of what an Arctic sea voyage in the 19th century would have entailed. Maude was interesting to follow, but could have been moreso, and I neither liked nor disliked hearing from Stowe. All of this came down to the ending, however, and the titular revenge, and I just don’t think the book delivered. The author made the questionable choice to keep Maude’s POV distant and hide a lot of her actions from the reader until the very end. This made her look kind of incompetent, and more importantly, just wasn’t very fun. If you’re planning a revenge plot, let’s see some plotting! Of course, save some twists for the end, but I just think it was a bad idea to obscure nearly all of it from us.
A huge problem is that Stowe isn’t just being pursued by Maude, but by creditors who have promised him violence. The existence of these creditors does a lot more to harm him than Maude does, in my opinion, and their presence really takes away from any impact she makes on him.
I would say this is mostly a missed opportunity, but I did have a good time listening to it. I wish it could have been a great time, though.