Vincent Stephens Stephens itibaren Kozvan, 03500 Kozvan/Sandıklı/Afyonkarahisar, Турция
Meh. Was torn between two and three stars, but since I liked this just a tad better than the second book, I had to give it three. I may re-rate both at two stars....
I LOVED this book. I would recommend it without hesitation to anyone who is dipping into the Regency formula that Georgette Heyer has made her own. The characters are enjoyable and the story moves fast. I am sorry I finished it! well, I have read it lots of times before, so maybe I will have to read it again this year...
** spoiler alert ** Raymond Austin is a long-time (white, male) television director - The Saint, The Avengers, Hawaii Five-O, Hart to Hart, Magnum, P.I., JAG - any of those sound familiar? I started this book, apparently the first in an intended series, favourably impressed. The opening scene, the heist of the title, was very visual, clearly imagined as if for TV, and well described. But as the story went on, I rapidly got sick of the rather self-congratulatory detective and his conventional and occasionally sexist attitudes; the body count was high and descriptions graphic; and Austin rather put the lid on it by deliberately juxtaposing a heterosexual sex scene (the detective and his one-night-stand) with a gay one (though the gay one consisted simply of a kiss in bed, and then one nasty treacherous gay man strangling the other one). I had the identity of the villain - not surprisingly a gay man - figured out well before the surprise revelation. And finally, to put a capper on it, the copy-editing, which seemed quite good at first, deteriorated badly towards the end, as if the last few chapters had been rushed through with all their spelling and grammatical sins on their heads. I ended up feeling, rather sadly, as if I had spent a few hours seeing one of those action-adventure movies I don't really like - or perhaps an episode of a TV show.