A Treacherous Curseby Deanna Raybourn
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780451476173
Series: Veronica Speedwell Mystery #3
Publication Date: January 16, 2018
Pages: 308
Genre: Fiction, Historical, Mystery
Publisher: Berkley
I love Veronica Speedwell. Her character is almost everything I admire in a person, with the exceptions of her penchants for collecting butterflies, necessitating her killing them, and her need to verbalise her sexual liberty. This isn’t hypocrisy on my part; I think it’s distasteful when men make their sexual needs topics of casual conversation, and it’s no less so when a woman does it. Boundaries. Good fences make good neighbours and all that.
But these are very minor niggles. Everything else about Veronica is excellent and Stoker doesn’t suck either. Raybourn has found that perfect balance of rawness, gentility, intelligence, anger, and grace in her hero (although I have to say, what’s up with the eye patch? Is that really considered sexy? I see one and have to resist the urge to pull it and watch it snap back). The dialog between the two of them is snappy and sometimes electric. There’s no doubt as to where these two are headed, but Raybourn is taking her time sending them there, and doing it well enough that I, for one, feel no impatience for them to get on with it already.
The mystery plot is the only thing that held this book back a bit for me. It succeeded in terms of leaving me guessing until the very end, but honestly it was so convoluted that I stopped trying to figure it out about halfway through and just focused on the characters until the end. That’s not necessarily a criticism; this is a strong book just on the merits of being an engrossing work of historical fiction. But my enjoyment came from the story first, with the mystery an afterthought.
Sadly, I’m going to have to wait an entire year for the fourth book. But I’ll be looking forward to it with anticipation.