Rating: WARTY!
This was an audio book I happened upon a the library and I found this story - set in the nineteenth century - intriguing and the voice of the narrator to be extraordinarily seductive. Indeed, it as the sexual quality of the voice which made the story more appealing initially, but curiously by the halfway point, the voice had become cloying and tedious, and no longer held appeal. It was a bit of a weird experience. As for the author, her real name is Jayne Ann Krentz, and she uses the 'Quick' pseudonym for her historical dramas, of which this is one - the second in the "Ladies of Lantern Street" series. I haven't read the first.
Krentz is a prodigious writer and has a host of pseudonyms - a ridiculous number, in fact: Jayne Castle, Jayne Taylor, Jayne Bentley, Stephanie James and Amanda Glass. She sold the original name to a publisher for ten years! That strikes me as absurd, especially since 'Jayne Castle' was actually her birth name. To me it's dishonest to present yourself as someone else for the sake of selling a novel in a genre different from the one you write in under your own name. It's as dishonest as pretending your publisher is independent when it's really just another imprint upon which Big Publishing™ has firmly stamped its own imprint - not that this happened here. This is the first book I've read by any of those names, and it wasn't a positive impression. Note that I only made it through half of this novel before I gave up out of sheer boredom.
Beatrice Lockwood has some psychic power - quite strong, but limited in comparison with the powers we typically read about in paranormal stories. Why she has it goes unexplained in a story where it's never actually used for anything significant. She can sense some of the history of an object just by looking at it and opening up her sensitivity to it. She was part of an entertainment duo, but went into hiding, functioning as a paid companion. As the story begins, we discover, along with Beatrice, that her old partner, Roland Fleming, has been murdered, and some Russian-accented assassin is now looking for Beatrice. This guy evidently recovered material from the home of the victim which is now being used to blackmail a woman named Hannah, who happens to be the sister of Joshua Gage, an ex-spy for the government. Consequently, he takes an interest in Beatrice, unexpectedly helping her to save her female companion from a kidnap attempt, which was why she was hired as a companion in the first place. The two form an alliance to track down The Bone Man who is evidently behind the murder.
The story was really interesting at first, but after that initial flush of excitement, it settled into a really slow courtship, and the murder and mystery took a complete back seat. It was truly sad. I was really into it to begin with, but then there was nothing to hold my interest. It was like reading someone's diary which after the initial excitement becomes diarrhea because it turns out that their life is less interesting than your own and kind of stinks, to boot. I can't recommend this.
