My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Category: Adult
Genre: Romance, Historical Romance
Content: Clean
Elizabeth Black is the headmistress of a girls’ school in 1830s
Victorian London. She is also a well-respected author of ”silver-fork”
novels, stories written both for and about the upper-class ladies of
Victorian society. But by night, she writes very different kinds of
stories--the Penny Dreadfuls that are all the rage among the
working-class men. Under the pseudonym Charles King, Elizabeth has
written about dashing heroes fighting supernatural threats, intelligent
detectives solving grisly murders, and dangerous outlaws romancing
helpless women. They contain all the adventure and mystery that her real
life lacks.
Fletcher Walker began life as a street urchin, but
is now the most successful author in the Penny Dreadful market, that is
until Charles King started taking all of his readers. No one knows who
King is, including Fletcher’s fellow members of the Dread Penny Society,
a fraternity of authors dedicated to secretly fighting for the social
and political causes of their working-class readers. The group knows
King could be an asset with his obvious monetary success, or he could be
the group’s undoing as King’s readership continues to cut into their
profits.
Determined to find the elusive Mr. King, Fletcher
approaches Miss Black. As a fellow-author, she is well-known among the
high-class writers; perhaps she could be persuaded to make some
inquiries as to Mr. King’s whereabouts? Elizabeth agrees to help
Fletcher, if only to insure her secret identity is never discovered.
What neither author anticipated was the instant attraction, even though
their social positions dictate the impossibility of a relationship.
For
the first time Elizabeth experiences the thrill of a cat-and-mouse
adventure reminiscent of one of her own novels as she tries to throw
Fletcher off her scent. But the more time they spend together, the more
she loses her heart. Its upper-class against working-class, author
against author where readers, reputations, and romance are all on the
line.
I read the second book in this series The Gentleman and the Thief before reading this one and I gave it 3 stars because I liked it but
didn't love it. Now that I've read this one I think maybe my reading
experience would have been improved a bit by knowing what I know now
(they are companion novels), but I think my rating would still have been
3 stars even if I had read this one first.
I have to say that this book,
in my opinion is better. I enjoyed the overall story more, and the
Penny Dreadful stories that are included were more interesting to me in
this book as well, although I still didn't like the way they interrupted
the main story. I did think that Fletcher should have been smart enough
to figure out who Mr. King was long before he did. That part just felt
dragged out for the sake of keeping the subterfuge going and not because
it made sense.
The third book in the trilogy (I'm assuming it's a trilogy) is being published in August and I will definitely read it.
Of course I had to look up some real Penny Dreadfuls and these are some of the ones I found:
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