Manners and Monsters Collection, #1-3 by Tilly WallaceMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Entertaining, but falls a little short in several ways.
There are four main threads going on. One is an extremely slow-burn romance (view spoiler), so slow-burn that it doesn't qualify as the driving force for the series in my mind. One is a mystery in each of the books; in the first and third, especially, the murderer was very obvious to me long before the characters worked it out, and I guessed the second one before they did too, so the mystery plots, though filled with good investigative process, were not as satisfying as they could have been. One is finding a cure for a curse enacted by the French during the Napoleonic wars, which has resulted in a number of highly-placed members of English society, including the main character's mother, becoming undead; little progress is made on finding the cure during the first three books, though it's always being worked on and kept before the reader's mind. And the last thread is the Regency setting, which occasionally stumbles over an anachronism. For example, the author brings the craze for seances forward from the mid-19th century to the early 19th century, and gives us, at one point, a Ouija board (not called that, but obviously that), which wasn't invented until the 1880s. Sure, it's historical fantasy, and there can be some anachronisms, but those particular anachronisms seemed not to have much purpose, and I had to wonder whether they were deliberate or accidental. There's an anachronistic-seeming piece of scientific method at one point, too.
More significant is the fact that, although it's mentioned at one point that the heroine can't visit an unmarried man unchaperoned, she wanders around half London unchaperoned with the hero and nobody seems to care at all.
Punctuation is usually correct, but there are a few dangling modifiers, comma splices, and vocabulary errors, including "omnipotent" for "omniscient" and "minds" for "brains". The author frequently refers to people being "interred" (which means "buried") in a facility where they are in fact "interned" - kept locked up to prevent them possibly doing harm.
She confuses gentry and nobility at one point (though at least she doesn't refer to nobles as "royals"), calls someone a "peer" who does not herself hold a noble title, and several times has people address the hero as "milord" when they have no way of knowing he's a viscount. In one case, it's specifically noted that he's not dressed "like a toff".
She misspells the name "Jonathan" consistently as "Jonathon". A (rather amusing) disembodied and self-aware hand is euphemistically named a "Romanian hamster" in one book, and in the next book has, without notice, become a "Hungarian hamster".
All these are minor irritations, but they added up, for me, to an overall impression of something a little bit scruffy and sub-par. That's a pity, because the big strength of these books is the characters- who are appealing and well drawn, and whose concerns engaged me.
They engaged me to the point that I happily read all three books, and that I want to read the next three. But the scruffiness means that I'm not quite prepared to pay full price for them. I don't feel that the quality is there to justify it.
It also means that, while this collection just squeaks in to my Best of the Year list, it comes in at the lowest tier. I've read far, far worse Regency novels, but the standard of the fantasy Regency novels I've been reading lately has generally been higher than this.
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