Great fun to read and utterly forgettable afterwards.
Plot: Captain Eversea has returned from war a huge bummer, so his family has tasked him with interviewing a potential new vicar for Pennyroyal Green and are hoping he is able to pry the stick out of his ass while he’s at it. But he’s an Eversea and so genetically incapable of following orders, so when a mysterious letter appears for him telling him to go across London to a weird museum no one goes to, he gratefully takes the bait. Only when he gets there, there are two horrors, one worse than the other. On the one hand, his ex Rosalind March is there, and she needs his help in finding her sister, who went missing after a bit of petty larceny. Then, there are puppets. Shenanigans ensue.
On one hand, the book is the epitome of Long’s writing style – it’s fun, it’s fast paced, it’s funny, all the characters are unique and detailed, and the solution is never simple or clean, because the problems she puts her characters in just don’t have simple or clean solutions. On the other hand, it borders on flippant in its treatment of the poor, and especially poor women. That’s not to say that I think Long thinks flippantly of these issues, not at all, but I think when one tries to write a story that tackles both serious subjects and humour, the balance is very tricky, and with this book, I don’t think she quite nailed it. The stakes were set, very high with a growing number of “pretty thieves” being vanished from jail if they ever made it there after their arrest, and the resolution was a “oh well, it could have been worse” sort of take that didn’t feel satisfying.
The other difficulty I had is that while as usual, the secondary characters are a goddamn delight, the main characters are rigid and flat. Rosalind is a Good Woman, and Chase is a Good Man, and that’s kind of the end of it. It makes them fairly uninteresting as Long characters go. Chemistry between two cardboard cutouts is hard to manufacture.
Not a bad book by any means, but not one that drew me in the way her books typically do, and not one that stayed with me after.