Review: Her Ladyship’s Curse
Her Ladyship’s Curse by Lynn Viehl
My rating: [rating=3]
Summary:
In a steampunk version of America that lost the Revolutionary War, Charmian (Kit) Kittredge makes her living investigating magic crimes and exposing the frauds behind them. While Kit tries to avoid the nobs of high society, as the proprietor of Disenchanted & Co. she follows mysteries wherever they lead.
Lady Diana Walsh calls on Kit to investigate and dispel the curse she believes responsible for carving hateful words into her own flesh as she sleeps. While Kit doesn’t believe in magic herself, she can’t refuse to help a woman subjected nightly to such vicious assaults. As Kit investigates the Walsh family, she becomes convinced that the attacks on Diana are part of a larger, more ominous plot—one that may involve the lady’s obnoxious husband.
Sleuthing in the city of Rumsen is difficult enough, but soon Kit must also skirt the unwanted attentions of nefarious deathmage Lucien Dredmore and the unwelcome scrutiny of police Chief Inspector Thomas Doyle. Unwilling to surrender to either man’s passion for her, Kit struggles to remain independent as she draws closer to the heart of the mystery. Yet as she learns the truth behind her ladyship’s curse, Kit also uncovers a massive conspiracy that promises to ruin her life—and turn Rumsen into a supernatural battleground from which no one will escape alive.
Review:
[I got an ARC of this book through NetGalley.]
Great world-building, revealed little bits by little bits and not through huge info-dumps, as the heroine faces the various circumstances that would demand some explanation for the reader to understand things better. A glossary is included at the end of the book, but I thought I could get most of the specific vocabulary just by using the context. The alternate history developed here seemed believable enough to me, and I went with it without a problem.
The heroine’s an interesting morsel, too. She doesn’t keep her tongue in her pocket, yet she doesn’t go on a feminist rampage every ten pages (which might have become boring after a while), and finds way to cheat the system in order to get what she wants (which is much more clever and logical, consider the powers she’d be up against if she were to blatantly stand up more than she already does). She’s resourceful in many ways, and has managed to create her own little network of useful people—whom good Torian society would deem ‘scum’, but can all contribute to Kit’s schemes for her to get the information she needs. I also liked how she went about discarding magic as something that doesn’t exist, and to explain this through logics and scientific explanations, when the true reason is actually quite clearly hinted at… she’s just the only one who can’t see it, much as if she was standing in the eye of the storm.
My main quibble with this story is how there’s no real conclusion to it. I know books ending on cliffhangers is all the trend these days, but this is too much to stomach. It reads like the first part of a whole book, rather than like volume 1 of a trilogy. Although it seems the next books are due soon enough (every two months or so?), it makes passing fair judgment harder. I wished the author had solved at least one plotline here—and I don’t mean the romantic one (that one might’ve been best kept for later, actually).
I may rethink the mark I’m giving “Her Ladyship’s Curse” later on: the world’s really interesting, and I want to know what’s going on behind the scene. For now, I’m keeping it at a solid 3… Well, alright, 3.5.