Oh well. Now I don’t have to feel bad about finishing up Deanna Raybourn’s Lady Julia Grey series. This one was kind of a bust. I’m a big fan of Raybourn and had more love for the Lady Julia books than the majority of her fans, but this final (?) book in the series was a huge disappointment.
A lot of Cannonballers have read and reviewed her books. I reviewed two of them this year, here , so I’m not going to get into too much detail about the background. The series is set in Victorian England. Lady Julia Gray discovers that her husband’s death was actually murder which puts her in the path of detective Nicholas Brisbane. The two exchange witty repartee peppered with innuendo as they solve usually interesting and fairly uncommon crimes.
In this installment, Brisbane and Julia are finally settling in and establishing a household a year after their nuptials. Of course, this domesticity is interrupted by Mystery! as Julia’s brother hires Brisbane to secure some compromising letters. Undaunted by Brisbane’s attempts to lure Julia AWAY from this project, Lady Julia embarks on her own investigation. The story pretty much unravels as the other books did and they eventually come together to solve the mystery.
In each book in the series, there is a clear shtick: Brisbane is the gruff detective who doesn’t want any input from Lady Julia and she consistently meddles in the investigations and proposes wild theories that sometimes pan out. Their back and forth is generally hilarious, and sexy and that entertained me through 4 of these books. It wasn’t enough to sustain this fifth one. I do recommend books 1-4 in this series, but will add that Raybourn’s new Veronica Speedwell books are fantastic and the characters’ shtick is a little fresher.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.