2023 historical mystery; eleventh in Huber's Lady Darby series
(post-Regency amateur detection). The Gages rush to Sebastian's
father, who was attacked and wounded on the road in Yorkshire, and
soon find that this matter will go deeper than it appears.
I found this a frustrating book for several reasons. First, the
threat of a permanent estrangement between Sebastian's father and
everybody else (which would clearly be the best thing for all
concerned, but I suspect that would be something the conventional
romance audience wouldn't stand for) is carefully headed off by Kiera,
not only doing all the emotional labour (which is annoying enough) but
using some very modern pop-psych ways of thinking and speaking,
which to me feel as out of place as if someone were to knock back a
WKD before checking Facebook on his phone.
And then one of the characters is a rural Yorkshirewoman, and this is
shown by her speech being larded with "thee", "thou" and "thy",
scattered in seemingly at random where other second-person pronouns
might have been used. This is just plain wrong and any test reader
fluent in slightly archaic English would instantly have spotted it.
(Back when editors worked for their crust, the editor would have
called on someone who knew if they didn't know themselves, and sent it
back for a rewrite, but publishing is run by accountants now, and they
don't mind readers gradually drifting away from books as long as they
make this quarter's sales.)
But I have to stack that on top of Huber's tendency to write at a
slightly more sophisticated level than she actually understands. For
example this:
This was the home of a member of the gentry or a prosperous
businessman, or, as it appeared, a surgeon of no small means, and
certainly not a dwelling to be scoffed at by all but the most
supercilious of individuals.
"Any", not "all", is clearly what she meant there.
It was a handsome house of warm yellow stone punctuated
periodically by protrusions of long, narrow windows.
"Protrusions"? Really? They're sticking out of the façade?
"I should hope I would have noticed the many thousand miles
difference in the length of that journey before reaching port, but…
I accede your point."
"Concede" is a different word and it means a different thing.
And while Huber is clearly proud of her research, and to be fair it
has mostly been pretty good in the series to date, she talks of
several former naval characters having bought and sold their
commissions—as if they were in the Army. The Royal Navy never did
this and ten seconds on Wikipedia would have let her know that. I
know, because I just looked to see how long it would take. This is why
your research should include checking the things you know as well as
the things you don't.
These are all nitpicks of course. None of them actually breaks the
plot. But had I been more engaged in the story, I'd have been less
likely to notice and be annoyed by them, or more inclined to forgive
when I did. Instead things seem to go round and round covering the
same ground and having nearly the same conversations until someone is
prepared to Confess All, presumably from exhaustion; but most
crucially of all, Kiera doesn't use any of the skills that originallu
distinguished her as the series lead. She doesn't examine any bodies,
or paint, or really even investigate. She's a wife, mother and family
peacekeeper, like most other women of her day. And that isn't the
Kiera I've enjoyed reading about before.
I'm having serious reservations about continuing with the series. A
skim of reviews of the next one suggests that the pace remains languid.