RogerBW's Blog

2015 historical mystery; fourth in Huber's Lady Darby series (post-Regency amateur detection). While Lady Darby is lodging in Edinburgh with her pregnant sister, one of he portrait subjects drops dead, apparently of an "apoplexy".

The detective story part of this is quite fun, and given a little more emphasis than recent books have had. There are plenty of unhappy marriages, and women who've found their own ways of dealing with them.

But that feeds into the romantic side, as Lady Darby contemplates her upcoming nuptials, and her beau Gage does his best to appear controlling, just like her horrible first husband. I feel that they're both doing rather a bad job here; he in not signalling her when he comes the heavy in public, to say "I know, but I have a reason, I'll tell you later", and she in assuming several times that his being controlling means that perhaps he isn't the one for her after all, only to return to loving him when he gives an explanation. This goes round and round without apparent progress, and does get a bit wearing.

Still good fun, though, even if Huber needs a better British dialogue advisor to stop her committing things like this:

Even the better-lit establishments contributed a higgledy-piggledy of noises to the night