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bluejayreads's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
fast-paced
4.0
In case you misunderstood the back cover as badly as me, Lord Maccon does not poof into vanishment - he just leaves abruptly, busy dealing with a lot of important nonsense and feeling far too busy to tell his dear wife about it. Alexia is not, in fact, hunting a magically vanished husband in this book. She's hunting the answer to a completely different mystery, and discovering her husband in Scotland is not her main purpose for going there.
Since Alexia and Lord Maccon are already married, this book relies more on the paranormal and mystery aspects than the romance (although there are plenty of sexual moments included). Personally, I enjoyed that quite a lot. This book has the rest of the London werewolf pack returning from war with a brief but delightful moment of don't-you-know-who-I-am, traveling to Scotland to meet the werewolf pack there and finding out why Lord Maccon left them twenty years ago, some new fun steampunkesque technology, and a lot more information about how werewolves, ghosts, and preternaturals work.
The characters were just as delightful as in Soulless. Alexia was her same adventurous tact-be-damned self, her friend Ivy still had her dramatics and horrible hats, Lord Maccon was still ... well, Lord Maccon, gruff werewolf and unintentional fashion disaster. There was also the introduction of Madame Lefoux, a French inventor, and Alexia's maid Angelique, who received only a brief mention in book one. There is also Sidheag the Alpha female of the Scotland pack, who I'm 99% sure is Sidheag from the Finishing School books.
I very much enjoyed the mystery and learning more about the supernatural elements of this world. But I'm not sure I'm going to read book three. Mainly because of the ending. The mystery is solved, the person(s) responsible are dealt with, and then in the last few pages there is yet another twist that leaves Alexia in a distinctly not-very-good position. I am absolutely sure it gets better before the end of book three, because Alexia is not the kind of person who lets things like this keep her down, but I actually find myself fond of Alexia and don't want to read about her in a terrible situation with few allies. I may come back to it eventually, because at least books four and five seem to have positive things happen and I do want to see more of Alexia, but right now I care about her too much to want to jump right into reading about bad things happening to her.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood, Death, Sexual content, and Body horror
Minor: Vomit, Fatphobia, Body shaming, and Racism
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