A curious Beginning plus seven more books

3/5. Series of historical mysteries with a “slow burn” het romance subplot, featuring a naturalist and her partner in many senses.

I’m about to complain about these, but I feel in fairness I should also point out that I did read eight of them. They’re comfortable popcorn books with a growing cast of colorful secondary characters and a variety of mystery/suspense plots.

But they’re also pretty annoying. Veronica, our protagonist, has a case of not-like-other-girls-itis so bad, it really ought to be fatal. These books are just heavily overclocked in general; Raybourn has zero chill about anything ever, including some very delicate emotional things. Also, this is one of those “slow burns” that I don’t think earns the name. Sure it takes them like five books to hook up, but that’s more annoying than tantalizing when they got fake married and started having whoops-we-almost-kissed moments in the first hundred pages of the first book. It’s not slow burn, it’s just here’s a fire but we’re not going to do anything about it for a series of more or less stupid or arbitrary reasons for an annoying length of time.

I did read eight, though. Fun, quippy, frequently annoying, generally entertaining.

Content notes: Murder of all sorts, a lot of stuff that is blurring together now

Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I don’t even fuckin’ – this job. I knew it would take all my time and energy and sleep and endurance. I didn’t know it would also take all of my brain, so there is no more brain for books, and I end up almost kinda liking things like this.



This is a “fluffy” but “dark” mystery-romance set in the “Victorian Era.” The hero is a multilingual sleuth with shady connections, a drug habit, and a violin – a Sherlock Holmes knockoff, not to put too fine a point on it.



Very knocked. Very off.



The heroine is a mess of characterization – she’s supposed to be a widow emerging from sedate respectability into adventures and self-fulfillment, but she’s mostly just inconsistent and wincingly stupid. She has wildly anachronistic ideas of gender, class, sexuality, and race (she’s eccentric, you see!), but then turns around and, awkward, blames a rape victim for being victimized. Which I guess just makes her a twenty-first century transplant, and probably an authorial mirror to boot.



But man. Great commute read.



Fuckin’ job.





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