The Midnight Queen by Sylvia Izzo HunterMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I very much enjoyed this. It was deeply, beautifully literate (and I found only one very, very minor typo, a missing "the"), I felt it was well-paced both for the romance and for the thriller plot, and I liked the main characters a lot, not least because they're not the usual gorgeous specimens you get in romance novels.
I took particular delight in a thing I all too often see done badly: the names. This alternate Britain of approximately Regency times has a setup whereby paganism has continued in Europe, with Christianity existing but never having taken off. A lot of authors throw that kind of thing in and never think it through; their paganism is generic, and their characters are called things like Jonathan, even though the Bible has theoretically had no influence on their society.
This author has thought it through. A lot of the rites (and customs generally) preserve Roman patterns, and above all, there is only one name from the Jewish/Christian tradition in the whole book. I thought at first it was a mistake that had slipped through, but no, it's explained, in a moment which also gives us more background to the world and shows us character. There are plenty of familiar names - Henry, Edward, Graham, Sophie, Amelia and the like - but all of them are Roman, or Saxon, or Celtic in origin. The Isaac Newton equivalent is called Ivor Newton.
This kind of attention to detail (and just knowing that there is detail to pay attention to) would normally, along with my enjoyment of the story, have earned it five stars. But I had to deduct points for a couple of things. One is that fortunate chance and Convenient Eavesdrops play such an important role in the plot, and the other is a spoiler:
(view spoiler)
As a matter of taste, I don't care for those elements I just mentioned inside the spoiler tags, and they're hackneyed by this time. And the excessive role of coincidence is, to me, a craft fault in an otherwise well-written book.
In addition, there is what is almost literally a deus ex machina at the denoument.
I'd still happily read the rest of the series.
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