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.
- Posted by Chris Bell at
11:38am on
17 October 2026
I'm fairly sure I know what she intended to mean when she wrote "all" instead of "any", but what she has done is make the end of that sentence mean the opposite of that intention.
Personally I dislike "long, narrow" because I think long is the wrong word; to me "long" suggests length sideways, that is, like wide, more or less the opposite of narrow. I'd use "tall" there if I were writing it, and eliminate any doubt about what shape these protruding windows are. I would guess that rather than "protrusions" she was casting about for the word "intrusions", which would suck swamp through a straw in this context but wouldn't be downright wrong.
And I have known people who would argue that protrude means interrupt the smooth line of something and is thus ok in this context. It isn't, but that would be their argument, and I wouldn't be bothered to disagree with them about it, I would just mutter "yes dear no dear three bags full dear anything you say dear" mentally, and pay them no further heed.
some writers irritate me so much with thee thou and thy that I find them practically unreadable, and I was bitterly disappointed in Patricia Wrede when she got it randomly wrong in one of her books, She wasn't even consistent! I think she may have been ill in 1988-9.
- Posted by RogerBW at
09:35am on
18 October 2026
As we were saying in person, even if a sentence is technically correct, if it causes a reader to have to stop and try to work out what's going on it is still a bad sentence. Similarly, a book can carry me along so that I don't object as much to errors, but if it doesn't, I'm less forgiving of them.
This business of Navy commissions would have been easy to fix: the people who paid to get a character into the navy might instead have used some influence on his behalf, and when he got out with a decent fortune, obviously that's prize money. (Prize money is even mentioned, because clearly the sale of a commission wouldn't be enough to set one up for life in style.) This to my mind is what the review process is for, whether it's done by a traditional editor or a modern alpha- or beta-reader: run it past people who can stand a little further back, and who may know stuff and point out the flaws while there's still time to fix them.
But judging by Goodreads reviews either nobody else knows that it's wrong, or they don't care. And one could make an argument that from the author's point of view it's not worth the effort to find and fix errors that, clearly, very few people will notice or care about. I am old-fashioned enough to want to take pride in my work rather than just doing the minimum necessary to get paid, and I like to imagine the writers I enjoy feeling the same way; but books like this make it very difficult.