Wondering Sight by Melissa McShaneMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the first Melissa McShane book I've read that doesn't (quite) make it to my Best of the Year list, and it's entirely Sophia's fault.
Sophia, the heroine, has a habit of concealing things from and also outright lying to her friends; getting pridefully upset and refusing help; taunting the dangerous psychotic who is her antagonist; and making bad decisions in general. She is, in fact, bordering on being too stupid to live.
This is particularly a problem because she participates in a romance subplot, and I have this quirk where I need to find both parties to a romance subplot admirable in order for it to work for me. The hero is fine - although, because we don't get his POV, he remains a bit undeveloped; he's your basic reliable, competent, hard-to-read hero. I find those work better for me when I get a bit of their underlying insecurity by being in their viewpoint. But it felt to me like his attraction to Sophia was driven by the plot rather than being organic, because she treated him badly and made, as I say, a long series of poor decisions.
She is highly competent at what she does, a combination of a kind of clairvoyant dreaming and psychometry, though she's foiled for a long time by a rival dreamer who is confusing her dreams and preventing her from getting the evidence she needs in the mystery that's the heart of the plot. She's accused a nobleman of embezzling from the War Office, but hasn't been able to prove it, and was quietly dismissed from her position with the War Office supporting the fight against Napoleon in the Peninsula as a consequence. She now wants revenge against him, and is driven to self-destructive lengths in order to get it. The try-fail cycles of the plot were generally good, though the way in which she eventually got around the method the villain was using to block her (with a minion who was capable of holding several incompatible intentions in his mind at once, and picking one at the last minute when it was too late for her dreams to predict the outcome) made no sense whatsoever. (view spoiler)
The series imagines a Regency Britain in which people have various psychic powers, and in which women who have these powers, even aristocratic women, are permitted (almost required) to use them to work in the service of the crown. This creates a sometimes jarring difference from our world's history in terms of the roles and behaviour allowed to women of the upper classes. The powers themselves are not clearly described in the text, and even though I'd read at least one of the books in the series before and had a head start, it took me a while to get up to speed with what the names of the powers meant and how they worked, based on what we were shown. "Show, don't tell" is good writing advice, but it's possible to confuse your reader by dropping in technical terms that are familiar to people in the setting but not to the reader and only gradually demonstrating what they mean. I wouldn't have minded a couple of paragraphs of exposition early on.
All in all, not a great Melissa McShane, though there's still some space between "not great by Melissa McShane's standards" and "bad". I was entertained, but I wanted it to be slightly better executed and for the heroine to be more mature.
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