Beauty Like the Night by Joanna Bourne

August 28, 2017

Anti - ci - patiiiioooon

http://www.joannabourne.com/
Sometimes anticipation is a problem. I had been waiting for Joanna Bourne’s Spymaster series to continue. I knew she was writing one which would eventually be named Beauty Like the Night and I was very excited. I consider Ms. Bourne one of the better romance writers around, and her Spymaster series is brilliant. Sadly for me, this book did not live up to my high expectations, excitement, and anticipation. While it was a pleasant, well-written story, I was expecting more.

This story centers on Severine de Cabrillac – the little girl who was adopted by Doyle and Maggie in The Forbidden Rose. Loved that book!

For those of you who didn’t get it, even after reading the name of the series, this series is loaded with spies. Severine is a spy and the man who sneaks into her bedroom is also an undercover guy – sort of. Severine’s midnight intruder is Raoul Deverney. There is a reason Raoul has crept into Severine’s bedroom; he is looking for his daughter, a daughter, by the way, he has never seen. His daughter, Pilar, was a witness to her mother’s murder. So not only do we have spy stuff, we have a child to find and a murder to solve.

Spoilers ahead. Now one might think it is Raoul who does the solving of mysteries, but one would be wrong. No, it is Severine who is the solver of mysteries. She’s an omniscient detective. She has all the brain power of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple. She is able to see things by studying dust motes. I had a problem with her smartness. She could tell whether someone had a limp by studying their footsteps but she couldn’t see her stable boy was actually a girl disguised as a boy. The missing Pilar. What kind of super detective is that?

I don’t know. Maybe I have Ms. Bourne on too high of a pedestal because I kept expecting something to happen. Every page I turned, I kept waiting for the shine to come through. If it had been another author, this book would have been fine. The prose was great, it was Ms. Bourne’s standard voice but for me the main could didn’t connect.

I didn’t feel any kind of chemistry between Severine and Raoul and I became irritated by the return of numerous characters from previous books. There also seemed to be an awfully lot going on and I thought the story had too many plots pulling the story in different directions. Those directions were eventually pulled together, but getting there was rather frenetic.

So I’m bummed. I was really looking forward to this story, lurking on the author’s website for updates. But I didn’t feel any chemistry between Severine and Raoul. There were too many scattered things going on, and as a smart detective, Severine failed.

While I’m recommending this book because it’s a part of a series, it isn’t one of Joanna Bourne’s best, and for me it didn’t work.

Time/Place: Regency England
Sensuality: Warm/Hot