Author: Emma Jane Holloway
Publisher: Gallery Books
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review.
I reviewed A Study in Silks, the first novel in this series, here.
I reviewed A Study in Ashes, the third novel in this series, here.
Yes, I know I said I was just starting this one! I did start it, but I had to put it on a hasty hold when I discovered, much to my dismay, that several books I have for review for Net Galley were showing "three weeks" deadlines in the reader: read it by then or lose it forever! I've never seen that before, but then I've never had so many ebooks lined up for review before, either, so I had to go take care of some of them before I can get back to this one! Sorry! Corporate responsibility and all that jazz....
However, I find myself this weekend not in a position to read the current deadline novel. There's no kindle edition of it, the Adobe reader doesn't work on Ubuntu, and Kindle won't read the PDF which is a protected file! Yes, they have it nailed down tightly, but that means I can't do what they expect me to do: review it for them! So I'm back to reading the "Study" series, but I have to report mixed feelings about what I'm reading. On the one hand, she doesn't know the difference between a decent romance and YA crapola. On the other, and this is a very pleasant surprise, Holloway does know the difference between stanch and staunch! Kudos to her for that much at least.
Anyone following my blog will know that I've identified (if I recall) three writers of late who do not know the difference, and as a writer, I think things like this are important because they tell us something about the author, and about book editors. If you cannot trust your publisher to get the cover right, and you cannot trust the blurb writer to get the back-cover right, and you cannot trust your editor to catch things like confusion between two similar words with entirely different meanings, then where is the advantage of going the legacy publishing route? Self-publish! But only if you are strong in your written language, and confident in being able to do the job yourself. However, if you got the other route, do be prepared for serious cluelessness, blindness, and moronic publishers who do not recognize talent when they see it. Recall that the following record companies turned down The Beatles in the early 1960's: Columbia, Decca, Oriole, Philips and Pye. Decca told them that guitar groups were on the way out, and that The Beatles had no future in show business! Don't lose heart. Unless, of course, you write romances as badly as Holloway does!
I must now address a serious shortcoming which shows up disturbingly in the first ten percent of this novel, and which is the sad debasing of Evelina. You will recall if you read volume one in this series that Holloway smartly tore up her playbook at the end, and scattered her four main protagonists, which I considered a very good decision. Imogen, Evelina's best friend was separated from both Evelina (who was banished from Lord Bancroft's home), and from her beau, Bucky, who was banned from her life. Niccolo, whom I consider to be a complete loser, became a pirate. That should convey all you need to know about his worthless hide, and that's also all I need to say about him - except to add that once I discovered that he was in this novel, I decided to skip every chapter in which he plays a leading role (which meant gliding happily past all of chapters five and six, for example). My worst fear is that he will not be hunted down and hung, but will come roaring back into the story, and it seems that fear is to become a reality. Indeed, Holloway starts this story with him, which I found depressing enough as it was.
And what of Evelina? Well, we learn nothing of her summer except that she was in Devon, a county in south-west England, but is now back staying with her uncle Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street, where she receives a letter from Imogen begging her to join herself and Alice Keating for a month before Tobias (or sorry-ass if you prefer - I do) marries Alice. Evelina has an attack of the wilts and the vapors over this, at which point she lost me as her champion. She's supposed to be a smart, strong, astute, incisive sleuth, but she's none of that so far in this novel, nor at all in the first novel. She displays none of her uncle's intellect whatsoever. Holloway actually uses the term "star-crossed" to describe Evelina and Tobias, which pretty much made me puke all over the Kindle (not advised).
Holloway needs to buck-up Evelina and get her mind away from that loser Tobias, who purposefully shot her uncle and would have killed him if he could. How did Che put it in Don't Cry for me Argentina: "Why all this howling hysterical sorrow?" This pathetic juvenile fainting away over him is entirely stomach-turning. Evelina needs to be given a new beau: someone worthy of what she can be, and she herself needs to become worthy to have him. Right now she's worthless as a character and as a human being. Holloway seems to have got it right with Imogen and Bucky (although there is precious little of either of them in this volume), so hopefully she'll bite the bullet and get it done for Evelina too, but I have grave doubts on that score. I think she's far too in love with her characters to ever dare kill them off, either practically or metaphorically, but maybe she'll surprise me.
Or maybe she won't. I almost tossed this novel at about 20% in, and moved on to something else. Sad-sack Tobias, of course, shows up at the hunting jamboree organized by Jasper Keating, the "Gold" King (steam-punk supremo). There was absolutely no surprise what-so-ever there. Neither was it a surprise when trollop Evelina and scum Tobias, fiancé of Alice Keating, (who happens to be a friend of Evelina's) flung themselves into each other's arms, neither of them caring two figs for Alice. So exactly how Dumb is Evelina? Don't get me started. And what kind of a lowlife jerk-off is Toby-ass? Evelina had one simple task at this hunter-gathering: to dig up useful information for her uncle and she blew it the very first chance she got, wilting like a used condom in the arms of the useless piece of trash who shot her uncle and contributed to building a bomb which blew up Holmes's home when he and Evelina were both in it. And now this faithless wench is having palpitations over this terrorist?
This novel was entirely unrealistic even within its own framework to this point. Evelina, supposedly a strong female lead, has shown herself to be completely worthless in her character's rôle, and nothing more than another air-headed appendage of a guy. And the guy is - how did Colonel Brandon put it in Sense & Sensibility? - "...expensive, dissipated, and worse than both." Alan Rickman's Colonel Brandon described Toby-ass's character best in the movie version: "the worst sort of libertine". I need more than this in a main character if an author wants me to follow a series; much more. But at least we now know where the novel's title came from: it was in Keating's study, in the darkness, that they kissed, and Keating and Imogen found them in flagrante de lick spittle. Now not only is Toby-ass under Keating's thumb, so too, is Evelina. Way to go, Ms Stupid Bitch! Seriously: is it Holloway's intention to make a reader detest her characters? If so, then why?! If not, then why write this crap?
Fortunately, I didn't ditch the novel at that point. Though I was revolted by Holloway's ham-fisted handling of Evelina-Toby-ass train-wreck, I kept reading and was rewarded. So she gets kicked out of the hunter-gathering and heads back to London incognito as a spy for Keating, and she ends up working for Magnus - the guy who got blown up in volume one, but who we all of us knew for a fact would be back, because why invent a new villain when you can quite literally resurrect an old one?! Right now my favorite character in both of these volumes is Magnus. At least he has something going for him - like a spine maybe?!
Magnus is laying low, and apparently working for (or perhaps merely pretending to do so) King Coal, another of the steam barons. He runs a puppet theater, although why he does, I have no idea; there's no reason whatsoever for him to be doing this as far as I can see, especially if he has King Coal's patronage, and Holloway offers none. He is maintaining a stable of automatons, one of which is the very Serafina doll which was purportedly destroyed in volume one. No explanation there as to why she's still hale and hearty, and Serafina has a life of sorts. She's very advanced, verging on being sentient if not already there, and Magnus assures Evelina that he has killed no-one and no animal to create her as she is. OTOH, this novel is set during the era of Jack the Ripper - the very villain about whom Imogen is having very realistic dreams. I am now suspicious that Serafina is Jack the Ripper and these deaths are what animate her. But then we all know exactly how great my guesses are!
So now Holloway has married off Toby-ass to Alice Keating, the only way she can get Toby-ass and Evelina together is to kill off Alice. Will she do it? She really jumped the shark, fell short, and landed ass-first in the fish's maw with the kiss in the study in darkness, because the only witnesses to that event were Evelina, Toby-ass, Keating, and Imogen. But now Holloway expects us to believe that the story somehow magically "slipped out", and has spread so that everyone at the reception knows of it. How, exactly, did that happen? No explanation. Everyone is evidently blaming Evelina, but there's no word yet on whether Alice has even heard the tale.
Well, I got to 50% through this novel and became so ill that I could no longer continue. It sucks. There are some really brilliant pieces, but all of that is lost in a foul miasma of tedious pedantry and brain-dead story-telling. It turns out that Toby-ass seduced Alice during the summer and impregnated her, and then he doesn't have the gallantry to spend their wedding night with her or treat her like a human being. There is no way in hell this piece of human gutter-trash will ever get back into my good graces, and if Evelina ends up with him, then she's scum too as far as I'm concerned! It's that simple. Why would I care what happens to these whiny-assed losers? The sad thing is that I have a third volume of this to which I'm committed for a review. I have the horrible feeling that I may indeed end up committed - to an asylum when I start delving into that volume! But rest-assured I am going to take a serious break from this before I read episode three!
This novel is WARTY!
