My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
The Body at the Tower by Y S Lee B
As I mentioned in the lede, this is the second book in The Agency series, AKA a Mary Quinn Mystery. I've read the other three already, and reviewed them here, with their grades, book 1.(B) Book 3,(C+) and Book 4 (C) I have been getting these books from the library, and this book had, for some reason, a much longer waiting list, so it only became available three months after the others, and I didn't care to wait for it, so I read ahead.
I describe the first book, and subsequent books as rather over the top penny dreadfuls, but with an authentic flavor, being written by a scholar of the Victorian Era. They are also marketed as YA books, with a young, 18 year old heroine.
The premise of these books is that "The Agency" is a private detective agency being run by two women who also run a school for orphan girls, training them to make a living in the male dominated Victorian Era. The best and brightest are offered the chance to become detectives, on the theory that women in that era were more or less invisible, and could investigate things without attracting attention.
This installment is perhaps the most down to earth one of the series, though the crime Mary Quinn is asked to solve involves a dead worker, and possible embezzlement or theft of building supplies, involving the building of what we usually just call "Big Ben", the clock tower of the Parliament Building. To investigate the questions surrounding the death of the worker from a fall from the tower during the night, Mary dresses up like a young boy and is hired as a helper to the bricklayers, who are clearly up to no good. Her romantic lead from book one returns from India, ill from the effects of malaria, and is hired to inspect the working of the construction on the tower for the inquest. Together, in an uneasy alliance, they begin to solve the case, along with a somewhat shady journalist, who shows up in later books as well.
The writing is fine, the highlight is a fairly well rendered Victorian London, and some thrills and chills, without being quite so over the top as in the other books of this series. Considered as YA books, they are probably a better read for that market than for me, who doesn't read YA, except by carelessness, as in this case. Still, I don't regret my time with them.
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