zero stars? zero stars.

Fun, great entry in a wonderful series.

Has the feel of a Victorian with the Timbuktu expedition and women writing for a newspaper but still great fun. ( )

Okay, I loved it from beginning to end. I was great and I give it 5 stars. ( )

Okay, I loved it from beginning to end. I was great and I give it 5 stars. ( )

Good parts:

* interesting premise
* lovely descriptions of hero (that NEVER happens for me)

Bad parts:

* repetition, repetition, repetition
* faulty logic
* lack of observational and deduction skills

Look, when there are exactly four people in your hero's household: the one who's sailed with the hero forever and has simply taken up residence, one footman who's briefly mentioned, a nympho maid who's tupping the briefly mentioned footman, and the lush of a housekeeper who's been there all 20 drunken years--but he doesn't suspect the NEW MAID, who, by the way, is the only one who can be hired because nobody wants to work for him, of being the one to be behind his sudden popularity in the gossip columns, you have an insurmountable plot hole.

When your heroine is infiltrating a household and she's supposed to be an illiterate city girl with a consumptive mother, she should probably not 1) use her real name, 2) actually admit she's a playwright's daughter, 3) be escorted back to the hero's home by the newspaper editor and his bodyguard (both of whom the hero has already met), 4) have an editor who requires her to break her cover and come in for meetings inconvenient to the household's schedule, and 5) READ to the aforementioned staff for their entertainment.

The hero's supposed to be an adventurer who collected specimens and wrote journals and such on his travels a la Dr. Stephen Maturin, and craves scientific recognition so he can finance an expedition to Timbuktu. Such a person probably should be more observant of the world around him, but apparently his dick does all the observing and all his dick observes is the heroine's eyes and ass. Very strange.

The heroine's supposed to be a crack investigative journalist, who can go undercover where men can't because she's a woman. She is also the daughter of a playwright and supposedly grew up in a theater learning how to act. And yet...her cover is thin to nonexistent, she can't act her way out of a paper bag, and she has no idea how to sneak around. A 7-year-old boy has better sneakery skills than she does.

The prose was mediocre, but then Avon's not exactly known for sparkle, so I wasn't expecting brilliance here. There were too many typos for a NY published book. Major points were repeated. Repeatedly. And once more, with feeling.

But I finally DNF'd in sheer frustration at the Swiss cheese of a plot caused solely by the characters' ineptitude doing things at which they were supposed to be skilled. ( )