Rating: WARTY!
I know exactly what you're thinking! Why oh why if he hated the first volume so much, did he ever begin to read the second? Well, there's an apropos for that!
I started reading this one, thinking it was the first of the pair I had from the library, but it was not! I had a bad feeling about this, and when I examined the two books more closely, I realized I'd picked up the wrong one to begin with, and it was the second I'd started reading! There is nothing on the cover to indicate this is 'Volume two of the Miss Hyde series' or whatever. There is a small note on the second volume indicating that the author wrote the previous volume, which If I'd paid more attention when I grabbed the book to begin reading, I would have noticed! Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa!
I wasn't enjoying volume two anyway, so I halted this and started on the first volume, which I gave up on at about ten percent in. I read a bit more of this one, to get it to ten percent afterwards, but it wasn't pleasant reading. This had the same problems the first did: unappealing characters, uninspiring plotting, boring excuses for steampunk, a changing voice between Eliza and the neutered Lizzie, and perhaps worst of all, the werewolf male protagonist was back right from the start. Barf.
There were some anachronisms in the books, too. I forget now which one this was in, but the worst one was the use of the term chauvinism to indicate sexism. The term Chauvinism was known in Victorian times but back then it did not have the meaning it's most-often associated with today; back then it meant something along the lines of the British term jingoism: blindly exaggerated patriotism. It had nothing to do with sexism - a coinage that didn't come into use until the 1930's, so no woman in Victorian London would have described a man as a male chauvinist.
So in short, this second volume was a fail just like the first one. But hey it's a series, so why not run with it? Maybe the publisher can sucker some addicts in. Not me. This is an exemplar of everything that's wrong and wrong-headed about novel series. You have my pledge as an author that I shall never write one. It's far too easy and cheap for everyone except the poor suckers who buy each tiresomely repetitive and derivative volume.
