When the young wife of an aging marquis is found stabbed to death in the Prince Regent’s arms, the matter must be solved discreetly. Sebastian St. Cyr, sole surviving son of Count Devlin has no idea why he has been asked to investigate; he doesn’t really know the Prince Regent, and he said after the last invesstigation he had no desire to solve another. That is before he spies the necklace around the corpse’s throat; a necklace said to have been given to a Druid Priestess by her lover James II . A necklace last seen around the neck of Sebastian’s mother the day she was supposedly lost at sea. (A necklace supposedly owned by a branch of the author’s own family; not that she’s ever actually seen it.)
With two mysteries now to solve, Sebastian will once again have to rely on his wits, his charm, and the assistance of Kat Boleyn, his Irish actress lover with ties to the French Revolution, his assistant the former street urchin Tom, and his former Army associate, the opium-addicted Doctor Paul Gibson. Will the killer be brought to justice? Or is this what finally topples the British throne for good?
The Catholics had burned the Protestants to save their souls from the everlasting fires of hell, while the Protestants had burned the Catholics because that’s what one did with people whose vision of God didn’t exactly match one’s own. It’d always struck Sebastian as a strange thing to do in the name of a Christ who’d taught his followers to turn the other cheek and love their neighbors as themselves. But then, Christ’s followers had frequently been slack in their application of that part of His teachings, massacring in His name everyone from the olive-skinned inhabitants of Jerusalem to the Irish of Dublin.
I was not really that big of a fan of the first book in the series, What Angels Fear. I mostly read that one because my mother wanted my opinion on it. Neither one of us was all that sold, so this got bought to give the series another chance. Right now, I’ll probably continue the series, but strictly on a book by book basis. I didn’t hate this book, nor did I love it; it was a mildly interesting read that made me slightly curious where the overreaching story is going.
It was a tad surreal to read this book shortly after finishing Season 4 of Queen Charlotte, and remembering that “Prinny” as he’s called here, is the same man here:
The two portrayals are vastly apart. Also, that Sebastian would be of the same social class as the Bridgertons; the closest similarity would be Devlin’s aunt. Like Lady Danbury, she is A Dame.
The whos and whys of the murder did seem to drag on until a “final 30 pages” burst of brilliant insight and discovery, aka murder mysteries a la Harry Potter movie (especially Prisoner of Azkaban.) The big secret of Sebastian’s mother, however, I saw coming since Book One. I do wonder how many more books it will take until the Great Big Secret of his past is going to be revealed; if it’s a series-long thing (the series is twenty books and counting) it will get real old real fast.
The various characters are, as usual in books, a varying degree of likability. Tom has spunk, even if he is borderline stereotypical tough street urchin with tragic backstory. Lovejoy, the police Inspector who helps Devlin (as well as investigating the murders that apparently bleed into the third book), was decent enough in the first and has only grown on me from there. Kat a little bit goes a long way on; I know she has another Tragic Backstory, but her attempts to “protect her great love Devlin from the truth” just come across more like “there, there, the levelheaded woman will protect the big strong overly emotional man”. Paul Gibson is another favorite; his struggles come across as very realistic, and he’s just a likable character. Devlin’s father and older sister though are just pains; he’s your usual “stern father of the Upper Class that thunders and tells no one anything” and she’s just borderline psychologically unhinged in her hatred of Devlin. (And yes, everyone calls Sebastian Devlin; apparently names are just things you have until you get a title.) There is of course a power-hungry politician that thinks no one is more clever than he is (and is thus surprised when *amazingly*, the MC turns out to be). Unfortunately, based on the synopses of future books, he isn’t going away any time soon. Nor is his daughter, who is a Bluestocking embarrassed by her class privilege and unimpressed by Devlin; I’m sure that in the future they will not interact all that frequently,
There are some decent detractions; a lot of the conspirators Devlin just lets wander off, and the whole ending to the mystery is a little anti-climatic. Justice is apparently, meh about whether it’s going to get involved or not. Though the true problem is an innkeeper by the name of Caleb Carter; apparently Harris has decided that as a white author she is not offensive using AAVE. It comes across a little racist.
On the plus side, several chapters are from other characters’ points of view, so you get a fleshed-out take on things.
And that’s about as enthusiastic as I can get about this book: it didn’t horribly suck while reading it.
