Wired

Dark Jenny by Alex Bledsoe

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I picked this book up because I had heard good things about The Hum and the Shiver, by the same author, but it wasn't available in the bookstore I happened to be standing in.

So I laughed pretty much all the way through this book. I think we should start with the fact that the woman on the cover is wearing an Elizabethan dress and the period of the book is, well, as much as it's period at all, Arthurian/middle ages. This is actually a cunning warning that history as you may think of it is not the focus here, and really this is a role-playing sword-and-sorcery version of Sam Spade.

The plot is convoluted, and I was going to mock it for the amount of (off-screen)incest, but that part is at least in the other Arthurian stories. To sum up, our hero is just tailing a cheating husband, like you do as a private eye, when he gets himself caught up in a royal conspiracy with murder and poisoning and coup and midnight rides with a corpse.

Let me be clear. I really enjoyed reading this book. It is an awesome airplane book. It's just not the kind of book you feel impelled to make your book club read.

Read if: You liked the Harry Dresden books. You are capable of reading ahistorical arthuriana without damage to your teeth or soul. You would enjoy the adventures of a reluctantly-moral private dick with a sword.

Skip if: You actually care about history. You hate noir retellings in other periods.



View all my reviews

Dark Jenny (Eddie LaCrosse Novels)