Review: Pippa and the Prince of Secrets

I'm coming up on my one-month anniversary of not posting any content on this blog and it was starting to make me twitchy. The problem with blogging for almost 20 years is that between work sucking out my brains I sometimes fall into the pit of "What more could I possibly say about the romance genre that I haven't already said?" Add to this that my reading of late has been very lackluster. Unfortunately while it's been bad, it hasn't been "interesting" bad which has left me with no spoons to blog about any of it. Then, right on queue, I land on Pippa and the Prince of Secrets by Grace Callaway. Was this a good read for me? Well - it was interesting and just absurd enough that I want to blog about it. So here we go...

Pippa is a widowed countess whose husband was a sack of garbage. He was a painter, she fancied herself in love, and after he made her wait for an interminable amount of time he finally married her - only to belittle her, box her in, and make her feel small. Eventually the man ends up dead and Pippa is at a low ebb. Thanks to events in the first book of this series (more on that in a bit) she meets Lady Charlotte who runs a discreet investigative service catering to society ladies. Her operatives are all women and Pippa joins their ranks needing a purpose.

The series is called "Lady Charlotte's Society of Angels" and Charlotte goes by Charlie.  Yes, it's Charlie's Angels set in Victoria London, I sh*t you not.  Right down to chain mail enforced corsets and the Angels being trained in self-defense and evasive street-fighting techniques.  If your eyes are already rolling out of your head, yeah - this book is probably not for you. And normally that would have been me - but seriously y'all my reading of late has been not good. I was desperate so I decided to roll with it.

Anyway, Pippa is trailing the husband of their latest client when she ends up in the soup. She gets rescued by The Prince of the Larks AKA Timothy Cullen.  She first met Tim as a teenager, through his sister who was a student at a school her parents ran for disadvantaged youth. She was smitten with him, but he eventually returned to the shadows.  Cull is the head of a gang of children and youth known as the mudlarks who earn their keep "gathering information." This has somehow been financially rewarding for them even though the author skirts around it mightily.  Hey, it's OK. I mean, he's Fagin but a more cuddly version. You know, without the thievery, abuse or anti-Semitism.  Leading a gang of children and teenagers though?  Still kinda icky.  Although this is Victorian London. I mean, the kids could be losing fingers and limbs working in a textile factory so - lesser of two evils I guess?  But I digress, adding another trope to the fire, Tim was burned in an accident some years before so now wears a mask so there's a Beauty and the Beast thing going on here along with the fact that he's been pining after Pippa for years even though he's not good enough for the likes o' her.

Eventually what happens is that because Cull is an over-protective ninny, he ends up mucking around in the Angel's latest case and soon the two join forces to track down a murderer.

Honestly, it's absurd. But it was at least entertaining absurd which is more than I can say for the last several books I read which ranged from just plain bad to bad and boring to just plain boring. Pippa does a little too much foot-stamping nonsense in the beginning but at least the sparring is entertaining. Also there's past guilt she has over her husband's death that kept me interested even though I had it figured out early on.  The middle sags a bit, the "I care about you" stuff shows up early - but once the murder mystery shows up I was all in. This was actually the best part of the book for me. I felt like the author did a really good job with it, throwing in a few false leads and red herrings to keep things humming along.

The sex scenes were a bit of an odd choice however. You'd got a book about a Victorian era Charlie's Angels group. I'm not going to take it too seriously. To a certain extent I'm expecting "playful." But the sex scenes read more "erotic romance" to me. I mean the couple finds themselves at an orgy at one point and there's another scene where they use a swing. Given that Pippa's husband shattered her confidence and gave her some hang-ups about sex, I think the author did a good job of using the scenes as "character growth" - but an orgy? A swing? Plus there's too many of them and they start to feel like word count padding. I don't know, they didn't really gel for me with the rest of the story.

So interesting beginning, saggy middle, and an ending that kept me reading because intriguing murder mystery.  This is just the sort of polarizing book that makes the romance genre interesting.  I'd wager about half of you reading this already want to stab your eyes out, while the other half of you can't one-click this fast enough.  

Final Grade = C+