Book Log #7: The Spurned Viscountess, by Shelley Munro

[annathepiper]

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I love me some Gothic romance, and Shelley Munro’s The Spurned Viscountess is certainly that, with all the right elements to yoink me right in. We have your innocent young woman with strange abilities. We have your nobleman with a mysterious secret, getting his brood on. We have your string of mysterious accidents. And we have your suitably spooky, remote mansion, chock full of potentially dangerous people. For bonus Get Anna Engaged mileage, we’ve even got a bit of an amnesia plot going on, since our hero has memory issues on top of his angst about the murder of his first love.

The atmosphere worked for me, and I found Munro’s prose solidly executed. I’m partial to healers as characters, which inclined me to like Rosalind as a heroine, though I liked her best when she expressed worry over the fate of her lost maid; she seemed a stronger character there than she did even in her interactions with hero Lucien. The mystery of what happened to Lucien and Rosalind in Europe provided a reasonable backbone for the plot, although it never really gelled for me until the very end.

Overall I liked this one well enough, definitely enough to read it through to the end, even if it never quite managed to be more than the sum of its parts. Three stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.