Great start to a great series. It helpd my attention and made me want more. Good descripsions of 1902 NYC and the class differences. Good mystery to set it all off.
This is a wonderful series and one of my favorite mystery/romance series out there. A must read for this book and the whole Deadly series!!!
For starters, I would just like to say, I love Brenda Joyce. Her writing is brilliant, and whenever I see a new book by her, I rush to buy it without even reading any other information on it, that is how blindly I follow this author. Well then why would she do this to me? This book is completely different from her usual writing style. It isn't really even a romance. Why? Why? Why?
It seems that a lot of the better romance authors are starting to write romance/thrillers in one novel, hoping to span both genres and draw in more readers. Some of them are able to create the balance between these two, but this book is not one of them. As always the book is well written and very accurate, but at the same time her characters lack the depth and emotion that I usually love in her other books. This book only seems to skim the surface of these emotions, and the two main characters Francesca and Rick Bragg don't really make me feel any type of hope for either of them.
The plot starts out in New York where the upscale Cahill family is having a dinner party. We meet Francesca, the bluestocking daughter of the rich Cahill's. She is secretly enrolled in Barnard University, and also has a great number of causes that she wants to enlist everyone's aid in. She is painted as a bleeding heart, but sometimes it isn't all that convincing to the reader that she really cares, and she sometimes comes off as a ditz. Francesca meets Rick Bragg (Joyce revisits her famous Bragg family, Rick is the son of Rathe of Violet Fire) the strong, powerful new police commissioner. Right from the beginning Fran is drawn to this stranger, but it is made clear she should stay away from him by her mother. On this same evening the son of their neighbors, Eliza and Robert Burton, is kidnapped. Fran of course finds the kidnapping letter at her house, which still makes no sense to me, and is never really explained in the book, so she tries to help with the case. At first she is a thorn in the side of Bragg, constantly trying to second guess him and one up him. Fran then makes a few careless mistakes, of which Bragg has to save her from, and they still haven't found any clue to where the boy is. What follows in the rest of the plot is a natural progression of hunting down the killer and eventually catching him. Thrown in there is a few romantic sub-plots, which seem to be tossed in to keep her romance novel fans happy. In the end we are left feeling that we didn't really get to know the characters all that well, which is very unlike the rest of her novels.
Normally Brenda Joyce writes novels that are exciting and have more depth, but this isn't one of them. These characters are so stereotypical, Bragg the tough man with a heart, and Fran, the rich girl with a brain. There is hardly any conflict between the two, and when there is, we don't even delve into their conversation, it just says that they have been fighting. I just cannot like a book like this. Most of the characters are only touched upon and you don't really get to know the character of anyone. There are also some more side-plots going about Fran's sister that just make the novel even more tedious.
