Witchcraft by Jayne Ann Krentz

Rating: WARTY!

"Author Kimberly Sawyer enjoys her solitary life — until a mysterious figure threatens her in her own home. But handsome Darius Cavenaugh is back in town, and he’ll do whatever he can to protect Kimberly from harm" Because, as hundreds of female authors are evidently quite convinced, a woman is fucking useless without some guy to rescue her from her own weakness and stupidity. Barf.

'Til Death Do Us Part by "Amanda Quick"

Rating: WARTY!

Amanda Quick is the pen name of Jayne Ann Krentz, an American author who doesn't do too bad of a job on Victorian London, but there are one or two fails. In Victorian times there were no such things as Crime Lords for one thing! The reader doesn't do too bad of a job either. Her name is Louise Jane Underwood. Apart from not knowing that the British pronounce the word 'process' with a rounded 'O' like in 'hose', not with a short 'o'; like in 'ostracize', she doesn't do too bad of a job. The story was quite engaging to begin with, but began to pale after a while, and I ended up not happy with it at all. I think I'm done with "Amanda Quick" now. This is the second title under that name I've not liked.

Once again there is a Big Publishing™ fail here. The cover for the audiobook shows a woman in a Victorian-style, bright yellow dress running away from the viewer across a meadow. This cover bears no relationship whatsoever to anything that happens in the story! LOL! This is one of the perils of letting Big Publishing™. My advice is to take charge of your novel. Why do book cover illustrators/photographers/designers never, ever, ever read the books they are creating the cover for? Why does the author not set them straight? I guess the publisher doesn't give the author much of a choice, and if an established author like Krentz has no such pull, then what hope is there for the rest of us? This is why I self-publish. I refuse to let an old-school publisher ruin anything I write.

This is one of the author's stand-alone novels. Maybe the name Amanda Quick is related to quick turn-out? She has a bunch of these stories. Starting in 1990 she churned out about two a year for half-a-dozen years or so. The titles should tell you all you need to know about the subject matter: Seduction, Surrender, Scandal, Rendezvous, Ravished, Reckless, Dangerous, Deception, Desire, Mistress, Mystique, Mischief, Affair. I got these titles out of Wikipedia and I wish I had read that before I picked up this novel! I have not seen the covers for those novels, but I imagine the covers are of some buxom woman in a bosom-baring pose, probably wearing a Victorian outfit with some dominant, self-absorbed, narcissistic, manly man ravishing her. He's probably bare-chested. The covers will be in pastel colors. Yuk!

The story, published a couple of years ago, was fortunately not one of those sickly things. In general was quite engaging to begin with, but it went downhill as soon as romance reared its ugly head. The romance was ham-fisted and so dominated by the male side of it that it was nauseating. I think the novel could have done with omitting it altogether or certainly muting it, but that would not have fixed everything that was wrong with this novel. The problem with it their 'romantic' encounters for me was the violent terms used to describe it, and the callousness of Trent's approach to Calista. It was sickening to listen to, and sounded not remotely Victorian at any point.

Calista Langley is in her late twenties and she runs an introduction service to enable wealthy Victorians to meet people who might be like them in that they seek companionship and perhaps romance. She vets her clients to keep out the riff-raff and fortune hunters. I think this was actually a pretty good idea for something to build a novel around: take something modern and set it in the past. Unfortunately the author didn't stick with that. Instead there came murder and dominating males, and it went to hell in a hansom cab.

Lately Calista's life has been upset by the fact that someone has been sending her memento mori: objects associated with death and funerals, and which have been engraved with her initials. She has no idea where they're coming from though the answer seems obvious to the reader. All we;re told is that they're from a stalker who at one point makes use of a kind of dumb-waiter that was installed in Calista's house, and of which she seems to be ignorant. It was a bit far-fetched that someone could sneak into the house unobserved, use this contraption unheard, and leave something in Calista's bedroom. It made her look stupid - and how would the intruder even know about the dumb waiter? It was dumb!

Into her sphere comes Nestor - a dick with whom she was involved some time before, but who left her for a more wealthy conquest with whom he is now displeased and who he wants bumped-off so he can get her fortune for himself. After a year, and out of the blue, he now wants Calista back in his life as his mistress, but she rejects him. What she ever saw in him goes unexplained, and iot makes her look even more stupid than she already did. Also arriving is author Trent Hastings who is at first predictably antagonistic to Calista, and then who predictably 'magically' falls in love with her and she with him. That part of the story was genuinely puke-worthy. He "heroically" helps her with the investigation, but essentially takes over her life. he has a sister whom he dominates and infantilizes in the same way that Calista's brother, predictably named Andrew for his excessive androgen level dominates her.

In Britain, and evidently unbeknownst to this author, there is a river named Trent. No one named their child Trent. It's not even in in the top 200 names, and neither are Calista nor Eudora, although Andrew is. Eudora is like the one thousandth most popular name for 1890. Please, a little more thought for your character names! There are lots of names to chose from that are unusual now, but which were popular back then.

The blurb says, "Desperate for help and fearing that the police will be of no assistance, Calista turns to Trent Hastings, a reclusive author of popular crime novels" but the reticence about involving the police made zero sense. Of course from the perspective of writing the novel it left everything to be done by Calista and her author acquaintance, but it stood out as being poorly addressed to me.

If you don't want the police to be a part of your story, fine, but please do better than a wheedling excuse as to why they cannot be involved! At least go to them and have them reject your position for some reason or come up with an intelligent reason why going to them at all will not work. Don't simply refuse to resort to them citing a lack of evidence when the evidence is steadily mounting in your favor. It made little sense, especially when Calista's home is being broken into and the two of them are being attacked by a murderer. It made no sense to avoid reporting these things and made Calista and Trent look dumb and clueless.

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Although I started out liking this novel, it is for these reasons that i decided it was in the end, not a worthy read. I cannot recommend this one, and I am done with this author!

The Mystery Woman by "Amanda Quick"

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.