#CBR11 Book 46: "The Lawrence Browne Affair" by Cat Sebastian

Page count: 336 pages
Rating: 4.5 stars

#CBR11 Bingo: Science! One of the protagonists is a scientist and his scientific experiments plays an important part throughout the story.

Official book description:
Lawrence Browne, the Earl of Radnor, is mad. At least, that’s what he and most of the village believes. A brilliant scientist, he hides himself away in his family’s crumbling estate, unwilling to venture into the outside world. When an annoyingly handsome man arrives at Penkellis, claiming to be Lawrence’s new secretary, his carefully planned world is turned upside down.

Georgie Turner has made his life pretending to be anyone but himself. A swindler and con man, he can slip into an identity faster than he can change clothes. But when his long-dead conscience resurrects and a dangerous associate is out for blood, Georgie escapes to the wilds of Cornwall. Pretending to be a secretary should be easy, but he doesn’t expect that the only madness he finds is the one he has for the gorgeous earl.

Challenging each other at every turn, the two men soon give into the desire that threatens to overwhelm them. But with one man convinced he is at the very brink of madness and the other hiding his real identity, only true love can make this an affair to remember.

Georgie Turner is the younger brother of Jack Turner from The Soldier's Scoundrel. He needs to get out of London in a hurry, as his underworld employer is none too pleased that he grew a conscience and refused to swindle the little old lady that was his mark. Jack's partner Oliver has recently received a letter from a concerned acquaintance, the vicar in the village near where the Earl of Radnor lives. There are concerns about the Earl's mental state, and the vicar would like it proven that the Earl is in fact not insane, like his father and brother were rumoured to be. The Earl has already scared away several secretaries and most of his household staff, so thanks to Jack and Oliver, Georgie knows there's a place in the Cornish countryside where he can hide out. As he arrives at the Earl's manor, which seems to have been left to fall into total ruin, he notes that he can always steal a number of valuables if he suddenly has to leave in a hurry.

Lawrence Browne, the current Earl of Radnor, just wants to be left in peace. He currently has only one maid and a housekeeper, and have them trained to leave his simple food on a tray outside his door. He knows he's likely to fall victim to the family madness sooner or later, but would prefer it if he manages to complete his latest invention before he goes stark raving mad. When his most recent secretary arrives, a very pretty man who doesn't behave anything like any of Lawrence's former secretaries, he's pretty sure he can scare the man off quickly enough with his wild temper, the state of the house and the sheer impossibility of getting his papers and affairs in order.

Of course, Georgie can't leave, unless he risk life and limb, so a temperamental nobleman is easy enough to deal with. While he may not have the education or qualifications a gentleman would have, he is intelligent, fastidious and very organised and simply cannot stand the mess that his new employer surrounds himself with. Besides, if he sorts through all the paperwork and tidies up the place, he might be able to ignore the obvious attraction between them.

Lawrence is not mad, but he does suffer from pretty crippling anxiety. Georgie figures this out pretty quickly and helps him find ways of coping. Working as a con man for most of his adult life has taught Georgie a little bit about a good many things, and it doesn't take him long to realise that the Earl of Radnor not only isn't insane, but he's really quite the unappreciated genius, who could be making a fortune of his brilliant inventions. Why Radnor has scared nearly all the serving staff and is letting his house literally crumble to pieces around him is more of a mystery.

Much of the book focuses on the interaction between Georgie and Lawrence, but there are a few other supporting characters who make the story more interesting as well. While there is instant attraction between the two men, they are also wary of each other and Lawrence has come to believe that his forbidden attraction to his own sex is one of the signs of his impending madness. It takes a while for him to get over his fears and what society has taught him about the evils of homosexuality, but in the meantime, he and Georgie can get to know each other better in other ways.

I think I liked this book even more than I did The Soldier's Scoundrel and I can see why Cat Sebastian has become so popular in romance reading circles so quickly. From what I can see, two of the supporting characters from this book will be the romantic pairing in the third novel, and I can't wait to see how that works out, as they seem about as unlikely a pairing as any I've seen.

Judging a book by its cover: While it's always nice to see two dudes on a historical romance cover (not something that happened until recently), the two guys on this cover look absolutely nothing like what either of our heroes within the pages of the book are described. At least this is a better cover than the one for The Soldier's Scoundrel. These two men at least look comfortable in each other's presence.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR9 Book 80: "Beauty Like the Night" by Joanna Bourne

Page count: 336 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Sèverine de Cabriallac was orphaned during the French Revolution and adopted by one of the foremost British intelligence agents, William Doyle. Her whole childhood was spent being raised, taught or entertained by various spies. During a youthful rebellion, Sèvie ran off to Spain and joined British Military Intelligence. She was in love with a French soldier, who died. No longer really interested in the spying game so many of her family are involved in, she works as a private investigator instead. One memorable night, a mysterious stranger appears in the bedroom of the inn she is visiting, brandishing a knife. He asks about a missing young girl and a stolen amulet, and seems to think Sèverine may know the whereabouts of both.

Despite the dire warnings of both her adoptive father and her brother-in-law, Adrian Hawkhurst, currently head of British Intelligence, Sèvie is intrigued enough to take the case offered by the enigmatic Raoul Deverney. He wants to find out who murdered his wife, stole the amulet that is a Deverney heirloom, and finally where his wife's (not his) daughter is. He claims that he and Sèverine have met before, many years ago in Spain, but Sèvie has no recollection of this. Raul is not entirely sure the legendary young woman isn't involved in the death of his estranged wife, but he figures she is his best way of tracking down the murderers and achieving justice.

As well as trying to track down murderers and a missing adolescent, Sèverine is helping her family foil a rumoured assassination attempt on the Duke of Wellington. Initially, it seems the cases couldn't possibly be connected, but as Sèvie's investigation continues and the pieces keep falling into place, the same individuals may be responsible for both.

This is one of the more low-key of Joanna Bourne's Spymaster books. While quite a lot of the previous novels take place during or in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic war, this one is set in the Regency era, after the various battles have taken place. Some of the book flashes back to Sèverine's spying career in war-torn Spain, where we find out how her and Raoul's paths first crossed. As is always the case in a Bourne novel, the protagonists are very well matched. Both have dark pasts filled with things they're not necessarily proud of. Both are extremely intelligent, observant and capable people, who find it hard to easily give their trust to someone else, because they've learned the hard way how easily such trust can be betrayed.

Sèverine was an excellent spy, having been raised in the craft as a child. She's also a diligent and efficient investigator, doing her best to help her clients in any way she can. She will occasionally help her family in matters of national security, because she cares about them, and while she doesn't want to actively spy, she enjoys the occasional mission. Raoul is also very good at what he does, which is rather more than being the wine merchant he openly claims to be. His marriage was one forced upon him and he never loved the woman, but feels he needs to bring her killers to justice both as a matter of family honour and to reclaim the family amulet. He is adamant that her young daughter is no real concern of his, but as he discovers just how badly the girl was neglected and mistreated and how much of the funds he sent to his wife for her upkeep were squandered, he begins to feel profoundly guilty about his own carelessness and ignorance of her situation.

The couple try to fight their mutual attraction for a long time, knowing it would be a very inconvenient thing for them to get romantically involved. Neither of them are looking to ever settle down with someone, yet they are so obviously made for one another. While there is a fair amount of unresolved sexual tension, there really isn't a lot in the way of love scenes, so anyone wanting more of that might have to look elsewhere. I don't know if Bourne is planning any more books in her Spymasters series, but if this is the final one, it's a very good conclusion to a very enjoyable set of novels. This book works as a stand-alone, but will probably be more emotionally satisfying if you've read some of the previous ones and know the supporting characters and their backstories better.

Judging a book by its cover: Now this is a beautiful cover. I love the use of colours, with the blue background and the red leaves in the corners. The cover model looks a lot like Sèverine is described, up to and including the red evening gown she wears in a very significant scene. I wish more historical romances had covers like this.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR9 Book 30: "A Fistful of Charms" by Kim Harrison

Page count: 528 pages
Audio book length: 17 hrs 06 mins
Rating: 3 stars

Spoiler warning! This is the fourth book in an ongoing series, and not the place to start reading. Dead Witch Walking is where you want to begin. Also, there will be plot spoilers in this review, so if you want to avoid that sort of thing, don't read beyond the next four paragraphs.

Rachel Morgan, witch for hire, discovers that her ex-boyfriend Nick Sparagmos wasn't just a part-time librarian with a knack for demon summoning, but in fact a thief, specialising in supernatural objects. Now Nick is in trouble, and her business partner, Jenks the pixy, is ready to risk his life to travel to Michigan to find him, because Nick took Jenks' eldest son, Jax, with him as a backup. With the weather being much colder in Mackinac than in Cincinnati, Jenks would very likely freeze to death.

While she is now dating Kisten, a living vampire (and her roommate Ivy's ex) and considers herself thoroughly over Nick (especially after discovering that he was lying to her about his actual profession while they were together), he did save her life once and she certainly can't risk Jenks killing himself to retrieve his son. She discovers a ritual in one of her spell books that could turn Jenks big, allowing him to safely travel, and another one to allow her to turn into a werewolf (a necessity since a hostile werewolf pack currently has Nick as their captive). These spells are demon curses, forcing her to pay for the imbalance of what she's doing by tainting her aura, and forcing her to once again reevaluate whether using demon magic, when not actually harming anyone or anything, makes you a worse person.

Rachel and Jenks borrow Kisten's large van and travel to Mackinac, where they locate Jax and figure out how to get onto the werewolf-inhabited island to rescue Nick. He's being tortured because he stole an ancient, incredibly valuable artifact that could shift the power balance among the supernatural species, and he's refusing to reveal where he hid it. Rachel uses her spell/curse to successfully were into a red wolf and fights the alpha female of the leading pack, defeating her partially through luck and sneakiness. While the various packs try to deal with the upset, Jenks rescues Nick and they escape. Because it's quite clear that the aggressive werewolf packs aren't going to stop until they get hold of the artifact, and quite possibly Nick as well, they decide that they have to stage an accident, where both Nick and the artifact go off the Mackinac bridge, never to be seen again.

I haven't actually re-read a lot of the books in the later half of The Hollows series, but even without doing so, I'm pretty convinced this will remain my least favourite book in the series. There are some good things in the book, like Jenks being big (apparently he is unbelievably hot, something both Rachel and Ivy comment on with slightly alarming frequency). They go to a new location, so there's a change of scene from the usual Cincinnati. Yeah, that's pretty much all the good stuff I can think of.

This is the book where it very much becomes clear what a snivelling little weasel Nick actually is and he's a character I never had much time for, in the first place. Rachel keeps trying to defend his actions and treatment of her for much longer than is sensible, and it's only when she discovers that throughout their entire relationship, he wasn't just a thief, but he kept selling details about her and her life to demons for favours and increased magical ability. Ivy and Jenks were clearly never particularly fooled by Nick, even before they knew the full truth, but it's nice to see all of them being extremely wary of him (while also sympathetic about the wounds he got when tortured) and deeply sceptical of his motives, even when he claims to be going along with their plan.

The situation between Rachel and Ivy also comes to a head, where Rachel suddenly, after three books of resisting her and being incredibly leery about the whole idea of blood, without any warning pretty much forces Ivy to bite her, and pushes her triggers until she loses control and nearly kills Rachel in the process. Ivy only ever takes blood from someone she loves, but Rachel is adamant that she has no pants feelings for her roommate, leaving only mindless bloodlust and a near-death experience for Rachel. She later claims that she wants to do it again and find a blood-balance with Ivy, but the living vampire is obviously terrified and guilt-stricken after the incident.

This book just has a lot of things I don't like, Nick, Rachel being an idiot when trying to negotiate her relationship with Ivy, a really convoluted faking an accidental death scenario, and hardly any of the things I do like, Trent, Kisten, Al the demon. Considering what I know is coming in the next book, I can't blame Harrison for wanting to take a break from these things, but on this, my third re-read, I'm pretty confident that it's a book I'll never much like and I'm glad I'm done with it.

Judging a book by its cover: The cover model on this book appears to be wearing a long-sleeved mini-dress made entirely out of leather, which seems unbearably hot (not in a sexy way) to me, and just the thought of the clammy skin you'd get from it makes me slightly twitchy. I can see the benefits of leather trousers or a cool jacket, possibly even some sort of halter-top, but a long-sleeved dress? Nope. It also doesn't really match anything Rachel is described as wearing at any point in the book, although I'm assuming the landscape wreathed in mist in the background is supposed to be the werewolf island part of the story takes place at.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 11: "Owl and the Japanese Circus" by Kirsti Charish

Page count: 432 pages
Rating: 3 stars

Alix "Owl" Hiboux is an archaeology grad student who was screwed over by her professors and turned to a life of art theft to support herself. After a job gone wrong, she ended up on some French vampires' hit list and has been hiding out in a Winnebago in the desert, playing online roleplaying games in her downtime. She's sworn off any kind of supernatural job ever again, but can't really refuse when a helicopter comes to pick her up to take her to Mr. Kurosawa, owner of the Japanese Circus Casino in Las Vegas. Owl is shocked to discover that Mr. Kurosawa is in fact a Japanese dragon, and refusing to work for him will probably result in him eating her. He arranges for the vampires to stop hunting Owl in return for her locating an ancient treasure for him.

As refusal will mean either that the vampires hunting her will track her down, or the dragon actually eating her, Owl reluctantly agrees. She finds the egg Mr. Kurosawa wants fairly easily, but is told that the real treasure the dragon wanted was the contents of the egg, a magic scroll, now missing. Owl's job just got a lot trickier. She enlists the help of her best friend, Nadya, a Russian hospitality waitress living in Tokyo and discovers, while fleeing for her life in a Balinese temple, that Rynn, the handsome bartender she's been flirting with on and off used to be a very skilled mercenary, and has been hired by Kurosawa's right hand man to keep her out of too much danger. Of course, Owl seems to be a danger magnet, constantly ending up in life-threatening scrapes.

As Owl and her two friends try to track the scroll, they have to contend with vampires, an ancient Balinese naga (part snake, part beautiful woman), near-impossible decryption, traps, double-crosses, vengeance spirits and more. Owl's supernatural detection is truly abominable, proven by the fact that most of the people she surrounds herself with turn out to be some kind of supernatural creature. She would probably be dead several times over if it wasn't for the assistance of Captain, her vampire-hating Mau cat, whose claws and teeth seem to be venomous to vampires.

This is the first book in a new series. I hadn't heard of Kristi Charish before, but the book was highlighted in January releases by Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and come on, it's an art thief chased by vampires working for a dragon. For $1.99, I pretty much had to buy it, not matter how it turned out. The series and the characters show promise, but for all that there is a lot to like, there is also a lot that didn't entirely work for me.

What I liked:
- The unusual set-up. I love the fact that in this supernatural universe, shape-shifting dragons are totally a thing, and have no problem believing that they would be fearsome and successful business owners.
- The variety of supernatural creatures in the story. Over the course of the book, Owl, for all that she is rubbish at spotting them initially, comes into contact with a slew of supernatural creatures. There are Japanese spirits, luck demons, nymphs, nagas, incubi, vampires, even elves. Somewhat different from the shapeshifter/vampire fare of a lot of urban fantasy.
- The socially awkward aspect to our heroine. Owl is actually a bit of a disaster socially speaking. She has a tendency to mouth off every time she feels vaguely threatened, which often leads her into more dangerous situations than she started out in. She also spends most of her spare time playing computer games, engaging in witty banter with her online players, at least one of whom becomes an important secondary character in the book.

What I didn't like so much:
- The socially awkward aspect of our heroine. Unfortunately, while it's initially amusing that Owl isn't all that great with people, it also became exasperating that she kept getting into worse and worse scrapes because she would recklessly and blindly rush into situations that were clearly hella dangerous or even obvious traps, or mouth off to the people threatening her.
- The number of dangerous situations Owl escapes more or less unharmed. This book is a bit of a roller coaster of danger and escaping it. Considering she is just a normal, frankly surprisingly clueless human (it's made a joke out of, but seriously, after that many situations where your opponents turn out to be supernatural, it's just common sense to start researching them and their weaknesses), Owl survives a LOT of bad shit relatively unharmed. She's constantly rescued by someone, be it Rynn, Captain the vampire slayer or even her friend Nadya. Even when she is injured, she seems to heal unfeasibly quickly.
- The pacing. Considering I, on occasion, read 400 page paranormal fantasy books in one sitting, or at most, a day and a half, the fact that it took me 6 days to get through this book should speak for itself. There was only a niggling sense of duty that made me pick it up to keep reading when I put it down. I did have a heavy workload while reading the book, but in the past, with books that are more engrossing, I tend to neglect said work, at least until I've finished the compelling book.

The book has promise and as long as Owl keeps growing and evolving as a character, I will give the series a few more chances. A lot of paranormal series take two to three books to really get good, and I can think of more than one heroine who needed to grow smarter and less reckless to really become a likable protagonist. I am a sucker for dragons, and any book series who have them as part of the paranormal big bads is going make me take notice. I have problems with your first book, Ms. Charish, but will be keeping an eye out for the sequel, hoping that the writing improves as the series progresses.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

CBR3 Book 24: "To Love a Thief" by Julie Anne Long

Publisher: Warner Forever
Page count: 368 pages
Rating: 4 stars
Date begun: March 26th, 2011
Date finished: March 27th, 2011

Gideon Cole is very close to achieving his "master plan". He's working as a brilliant barrister and making quite a name for himself among the ton of London (most of whom have no idea that he rarely, if ever makes much money winning cases left, right and centre). He just needs a little bit of cash to put down a deposit on a grand town house, so he can propose to the incomparable Lady Constance, daughter of a Viscount, and once his uncle, who's been dying for years, finally croaks, he'll have a title and an estate to support his intended in the style to which she is accustomed. He's getting a bit worried at Lady Contance's preference for one of the handsome young Lords, though, whose got a title, tons of money and perfectly passable looks, and may steal the lady away from Gideon if he doesn't work fast.

On his way to sign the contract for the town house, Gideon ends up paying his remaining thirty pounds (which he needed for the deposit) to a furious gentleman intent on harming a female pickpocket. Gideon recognizes the young woman who tried to pick his pocket the day before, but can't stand to see a woman being hurt, so pays the man to let her go. Remembering his friend's advice that what Lady Constance really needs to start noticing how promising Gideon is as a match is a rival of her own, Gideon hatches a plan. Miss Lily Masters is clearly a very pretty young woman, and after a short time spent in her company, Gideon is assured that she's been raised well and has fairly good manners. He just needs a few weeks to turn the pickpocket into a lady of the ton, and then he will have everything he ever dreamed of.

Lily is a fiercely protective sister, she's smart, she's capable, she's kind and she's observant. She's desperately trying to make ends meet, and to begin with, she hates Gideon for forcing her to work for him, and taking her and her little sister to his uncle's country estate, where they experience luxury unlike anything they've ever seen before. Lily knows that she'll only be acting the lady until Gideon wins Lady Constance, and then she'll have to explain to her sister why they're destitute again. Yet as she gets to know him, through spending time with him and speaking to the other people in his life, his uncle, his best friend, the servants of the estate, that he is a very good man and has been driven to make something of himself, to the expense of everything else.

To Love a Thief is a take on Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, where while trying to turn a street urchin into a lady, the cultured gentleman falls in love with his charge. Julie Anne Long writes delightful characters, and there are so many great scenes in this book. I very much enjoyed it, and am absolutely going to check out more of Julie Anne Long's back catalogue.