Category Archives: Detectives

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An Unexpected and Very Badass Romance Is Why I Kept Watching AMC’s The Killing

tk-s3-gallery-linden-holder-760-21Let me confess up front that one of the principal reasons I haven’t been blogging much is that I haven’t been reading as much as usual this winter. And this is primarily a book blog, right? There’s still a part of me that feels guilty about watching television instead of reading. But the availability of streaming television series, whole seasons and even whole series available for the bingeing, is changing how I consume media, as it is for so many people. I used to occasionally binge on a whole season of something good, back in the days of waiting for the DVD release. These days, hardly a week goes by without a streaming binge of one show or another, from OITNB to GoT to Boardwalk Empire.  I’ve become obsessed with new content from new producers – Sundance (Rectify, An Honourable Woman, The Red Road), Amazon (Transparent, Mozart in the Jungle), Netflix (House of Cards, of course). Downton, Sons of Anarchy, The Good Wife and The Americans are among the few remaining shows in which I didn’t or can’t overindulge.  Oh, and Mad Men, which is maddeningly STILL not back to wrap up its serialized Great Expectations tale of Don Draper.

The thing is, being able to keep watching numerous episodes in one evening, bingeing on a serial television program is starting to feel more and more like my old reading habits, staying up into the wee hours consuming chapter after chapter of an engrossing novel.  Of course tv and books are not the same, and neither is watching vs. reading, but there’s something about some of the most compulsively watchable series that feels a little bit like reading an intricately plotted, un-putdownable novel.

10860051_375675945890414_535456110_aAnd this is how it was for me with watching AMC’s The Killing. At first it was just beautiful and moody and arrestingly sad. Then it bogged down with its own pretension, and some ridiculous plot points, but the relationships, the characters and the actors, and the gloomy vision of a rain-soaked Seattle kept me hooked.

The other key ingredient was following episode by episode commentary from Vulture’s Starlee Kine. Her recaps full of pissed off commentary (about gaping plot holes, leaps of logic, cops being terrible at their jobs, implausible medical miracles and lack of appropriate law enforcement technology) resonated and deepened my attachment to the show. The show did garner a lot of critical attention, both positive and negative, for some of its risky and/or groundbreaking elements. But it seems I am not the only one to fall under the spell of the relationship at the center of The Killing, so much so that you’re willing to put up with all kinds of nonsense, just to keep watching this pair of damaged souls find their way. Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman) and Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) kept me mesmerized.

SPOILERS BELOW ….. (but here’s a spoiler-free review of Season 4 by Jeffrey Bloomer for Slate) 

And at the end of the final season…. a Happy Ending!  As in a real live, romantically-together-at-the-end-of-the-story, HEA, or at least an HFN, for the series’ two protagonists. It turns out Holder and Linden really were the main couple in a four-season-long, made-for-cable-and-netflix, contemporary romantic suspense thriller. This was one of the most emotionally satisfying television finales since the brilliant end of Six Feet Under.  But it felt very different, because of its close focus on just the two main characters, rather than showing us a montage of all the characters and their various fates.  It felt like the end of a very long, very suspenseful, almost-DNF’d-when-it seemed-to-go-off-the-rails, romance novel.

Here’s how four seasons of a moody, pretentious crime drama (based on the Danish drama Forbrydelsen, or The Crime) ended up feeling like a romance novel, in a good way (and I find I don’t care about the tv noir fans who decried the happy ending as “too American” or too cheesy):

2f02f3be-d214-b142-d53d-ed227fa777b7_TK_307_CS_0429_0186.jpgTortured Hero Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman), silver-tongued smoldering Swedish 12-stepper. He had a rough childhood, made his way onto the police force as an undercover narcotics officer, got addicted to methamphetamine, got sober, got promoted to Homicide, and has the most amazing soliloquies that are themselves an addicting blend of American street slang, laconic delivery, 12-step taglines, irony, self-deprecating humor, psychological insight, and Kinnaman’s nascent Swedish accent slipping in from time to time. It’s not that he’s always got his shit together, but he manages to rise above even his own most horrible behavior, to own his bad acts, make reparation, and see through his own posing. When he’s crushed by grief and guilt and doubt (there are some really bad and tragic things that happen to people in this show), he somehow even seems to embrace these as necessary steps on the path. His most vulnerable moments are heartbreakingly simple: when he’s forced to let down his nephew on the boy’s birthday in order to support Linden in a terrible circumstance; when he visits the grave of a murdered teen runaway he had tried to help, used as a confidential informant, and ultimately failed to protect.

downloadEven more Tortured Heroine Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos), enigmatic single mom; a supposedly brilliant detective whose empathy for victims pushes her to extreme lengths to catch killers even as she neglects her own tween son so much she almost loses him. A hard-knock child of the foster care system herself, she is a mass of denial and self-delusion/self-confusion about what she really wants, where she really belongs. For the entire first season she’s supposed to be leaving Seattle to move to sunny California and get married, but you can tell from the outset that she’s never really going to go that easy route, and that the guy who’s her intended mate is All Wrong For Her. But it’s done with such intensity and misdirection in terms of the writing that it actually feels stunning when it’s finally revealed that he was her psychiatrist during her most recent lockup — she has a history of compulsive obsession with a closed case she’s convinced put the wrong guy in jail, and it’s wreaked havoc with her mental health.

10808688_1406921106271566_586127293_nMeet cute  Still, she’s a star homicide detective, so even though it’s her last day on the job, she gets assigned to mentor the new kid just promoted from Narcotics when they land a high-profile case of a murdered teen who may have been killed by one of half a dozen of Seattle’s leading citizens. The scenes where she’s trying to clear out her desk and leave while he’s trying to chat her up are fantastic. She gives him NOTHING, she’s so convinced she can walk away from the case and all she wants to do is get on that plane to California. Their boss does keep pressuring her to stay for this case because he doesn’t know/trust Holder yet. She insists she will give him only one day, then one more day. But somehow she just keeps missing the damn flight…. And Holder can tell she’s not going anywhere. His self-awareness gives him the compassion and capacity to “get” her before she can begin to get herself. There are numerous times when, in spite of his youth and charisma and hoodies, and her horrible mom sweaters and measured pace, he shows himself to be the more emotionally mature one. Meanwhile, she’s busy writing him off as a recovered-tweaker hipster who happens to have mad getting-street-people-and-teens-to-share-information-and-secrets skills. Their conversations are the best part of the show, and the episodes devoted to watching them ride around talking and smoking were some of my favorite hours of storytelling in a long time.

10729214_773357939410073_326592516_nRescuing each other, literally and emotionally It’s a darkly intense crime drama, so there are a lot of other things going on, from the raw pain of the victim’s grieving parents and siblings to corrupt politicians, snarky campaign operatives, and enough creepy possible suspects from all walks of life to fill at least a dozen different Law & Order cases. And like all noir-ish detective shows, the plot places the protagonists in grave personal peril – there is one beautifully produced sequence involving a kidnapped Linden secretly keeping her radio on and talking to her abductor for hours, using clues and codes that only Holder will comprehend, so that after a whole incredibly intense episode he is finally able to locate her and bring in the rescue operation.  Of course this kind of thing is a metaphor for the ways in which they can rescue each other emotionally, if they are willing to be honest with one another.

A Happy Ending It’s not a surprise that Holder is the first to recognize and acknowledge their deep connection. The challenge, both for the characters and for the viewer, is having the patience and trust to wait for Linden to get there. The final episode delivers with a classic romance novel trope — the last-minute capitulation. It’s a year since they have survived their final horrific case, which includes some very bad business for which both of them have risked prosecution. Linden’s been drifting around the country, visiting her son who she’s finally placed in the more stable environment of his father’s (out-of-state) home. Holder’s been recovering his equilibrium and grounding himself further as a Narcotics Anonymous staff leader. She “stops by” to see him. They talk about how much they mean to each other. But she can’t see herself putting down roots anywhere. They embrace and he lets her go, but not without ratcheting up the sexual tension a couple dozen notches. Still, she walks away. And he loves her enough to know she can’t be chased. All seems dire. But then it’s several hours later and she’s there on the sidewalk waiting for him at the end of the day. And she’s finally all in. And that’s the end of the show – just some quick shots of their joyful faces, and not even a cliche’ clinch. (Not onscreen anyway – show creator and director Veena Sud has said that Enos and Kinnaman did in fact kiss during the final take, but the camera had moved on so it wasn’t captured.)

tumblr_n9omjwbxeJ1ql3i4oo3_250The heroine’s journey It was reading this Veena Sud interview that really affirmed the connection for me between the story of Linden and Holder, and the romance genre. While Holder was the more charismatic character, making it easy to focus on the ways Kinnaman made him really leap off the screen, the overarching narrative is Linden’s journey. Which connects The Killing to one of the ways the romance genre is often read, as a narrative formula that comprises the heroine’s journey from a state of incompletion and lack of self-knowledge, to wholeness, integration, and her emotionally proper place in the world.  Linden finally tells Holder that she’s found her home, and it’s not a place, it’s him. Sud references this directly when she’s asked about a possible fifth season for the duo:

We brought her to the end of her journey. She found the thing that she was looking for all along. It’s the end of the story.

As is right and proper for a satisfying romance. It was such a treat for the show to end this way. Somehow they managed to pull off the happy ending in a way that feels believable, yet unexpected. I did stick with this drama even when I knew I was watching a show that was going off the rails in many ways, because of the chemistry and emotion between these two.  It was often so bleak and damp and dark I certainly did not expect an HEA out of the experience. I don’t know if this is because I wasn’t paying close enough attention, or because Sud and her team just decided very late in the game to give fans the satisfaction.  But I for one thoroughly enjoyed the emotional payoff – and I think people like me who hung in with this show deserved it.

ee866e46c16c6dbae2dd20f768dad275I’m casting around trying to think of other shows where the two leads end up together when the show ends…. Maybe Moonlighting? I honestly can’t remember how that finally ended. How about the fun US Marshal drama, In Plain Sight – nope, that one ended disappointingly for some fans, with Mary and Marshall agreeing she was better as his work wife than she could possibly ever be as his real spouse/lover.

How many other tv shows are there where the ending has the look and feel of a romance novel HEA for the two main protagonists?

 

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Too Much of a Good Thing? I’m Having a Hard Time Keeping Up with Liz Carlyle

In which I revisit a favorite author, try to review a recent book (A Bride By Moonlight), and get tripped up by complications and connections

There are many moods and phases meandering across the chronology of my years as a faithful romance reader. Maybe one of these days I’m going to plot it out on some kind of timeline, or “family” tree of subgenres and series.

The novels of Liz Carlyle fall into the post-Outlander, pre-JoBev, very Black Dagger Brotherhood phase when I was parenting twin preschoolers and basically stuck at home (or the playground) with them whenever we weren’t at daycare and the office, respectively. Hectic, exhausting days, but kids in bed early and evenings to myself for second shift chores, or ignoring the laundry, binge-watching episodes of Sharpe, and reading. (In case anyone’s wondering, this is the phase when I also read about 29 versions of the same book by Stephanie Laurens.) Sometime during this phase I picked up a copy of Carlyle’s My False Heart because of its (then) unusual cover and was utterly charmed by its unusual blend of smoldering romance, good conversation, artsy ambience, and eccentric domestic goings-on.

I fell easily into this Regency world, which has more of Chase than of Laurens, is angsty in the right ways, and is populated by memorable characters who pop up across her overlapping series. And I’ve been a faithful reader. I’m not an “auto-buy” kind of consumer, but I’ve kept up, and this winter I found a copy of her recent A Bride By Moonlight at my local used paperback shop. I’ve been trying to write this “review” post for weeks now and I think I’m stuck because it was somehow both predictable and confusing.  And “meh” reviews are always the hardest to write. To help organize my thoughts, sometimes I just start with the basics:

The Hero Ruthless police commissioner Royden Napier, known in his line of work as Roughshod Roy, he proves disarmingly and appealingly open, self-aware, and compassionate. He’s patient with human frailty and weakness in spite of having made his living as a crimestopper and prosecutor.

The Heroine Live-by-her-wits journalist and living-under-assumed-identity/ies expert Lisette Colburne, prime suspect in a murder that happens in another book in the series. She’s a survivor, so her impregnable fortress of bitterness is understandable, but becomes tiresome.

The Setting 19th century England (1840s). London (a little bit) and Burlingame, stately estate of Napier’s grandfather, Lord Duncaster, and also home to an odd lot of assorted family members he’s suddenly got to get to know, and get on with. Son of Burlingame’s exiled third son, Napier never expected to inherit title or house, and now he’s also been asked by his boss (an old friend of his grandfather) to discreetly investigate two possibly questionable deaths which have taken place in the ancestral home.

The tropes  Heroine with shadowy past, assumed identity/ies and guilty secret, Hero suddenly becomes heir to a title, Multiple mysterious deaths, Hero and heroine as detective partners, Weak and selfish elderly aunt and her dysfunctional family, Implied lesbian secondary characters, Hero who falls in love first and does not withhold, Virgin heroine who wants sex but not truth-telling.

Nope, it didn’t really work.  My thoughts on this book remain thoroughly inchoate and disorganized. But I’m coming to understand that for me the story itself felt disorganized, and it’s because there are maybe too many connections to other books, and too much plottiness. In trying to write about this book I’m also realizing it’s nearly impossible to write about a Carlyle novel without talking about multiple books, and I’m guessing this post will be as confusing to read as A Bride by Moonlight.

ABBM is the fourth novel in a sequence of books set around a group of friends/acquaintances loosely connected to the MacLachlan family first met in Carlyle’s engaging “Devil” and “One Little, Two Little…” series. The first two books in this “series” — and I hesitate to call it a series for reasons that will become clear — were One Touch of Scandal and The Bride Wore Scarlet, and these were billed as the start of a new and exciting HistRom series with paranormal elements. The paranormal element was basically a secret society, the Fraternitas, charged with protecting the Vateis — individuals with supernatural visions who are vulnerable targets for evil-doers because of their ability to see the future. Okay, I was willing to go along.

Just to review… I loved My False Heart, which I still consider a near-perfect “mysterious stranger in our midst” romance novel. Carlyle is an author I purposefully glommed at one point, she writes intricately connected books with strong world-building, and I’m familiar with her canon. Her “Never” series (Never Lie to a Lady, etc.) still stands as one of my all-time favorite HistRom trilogies, with echoes of Gaskell in its treatment of class, enterprise, and industry.

Even though I felt the Fraternitas (which by the second book had been rechristened, in England, the St. James Society) was entirely unnecessary — here was an author who was writing strong, compelling Regency and mid-19thc historicals and managing to build a web of connected stories WITHOUT relying on a secret brotherhood of superheroes — I enjoyed these newer books because they still featured the crisp dialogue and authentic characters with real problems, that I expect from Carlyle.

But. Don’t add secret societies and paranormal elements when it’s already hard to follow what’s going on!  But even though I’m pretty lenient about crazy plotting if the characters work for me, it’s got to hang together at least a little…. which brings me to the third book in this sequence – The Bride Wore Pearls.  Here, it was actually my favorite two characters from the previous novels, Lady Anisha Stafford, and Rance Welham, Lord Lazonby. These two each brought something intriguing and smoldering to their appearances in earlier books and I was so ready to immerse myself in their combined story. But their book was a mess. Jean Wan’s review for AAR says it so much better, and more hilariously, than I can. She gives it a D+. And she has history with Carlyle, much as I do. But this book is nearly impossible to follow, there are so many things you need to know from earlier books that it’s difficult even if you have read all the earlier books. My only point of difference with Jean is that I, pathetically I guess, still did care about Nish and Rance…. and here they are again as a married couple in A Bride by Moonlight.

But even a ruthlessly uxorious Lazonby isn’t enough to make things work. Something is still very wrong in Carlyle’s world. Here, the heroine has had so many identities, both in this book and the one prior, that I literally kept forgetting who we were talking about, when someone referred to one of her other aliases. The suspense element and the multiple overlapping secrets and mysteries have outgrown my capacity to follow or care, when I’d rather be following and caring about Napier and Lisette. It’s also possible I just have less patience with whodunits, as a very reluctant mystery reader, and the set-up here throws the two together as partners in solving a new mystery, even as Napier seeks to uncover the truth about Lisette’s pose as a (male) muckraking journalist in the mysteries from the previous books.

Once again, Lisette is undercover, and once again there’s just too much subterfuge. I was truly sad not to like this book more, especially since there are wonderfully and characteristically skillful renderings of numerous secondary characters. I couldn’t connect to Napier and Lisette as a couple — I found myself wanting him to get what he deserved, and be happy, and wanting her to stop being such a ninny and give it to him. He’s much more sympathetic, I suppose, and this is actually quite interesting in terms of discourses around the “unlikeable heroine.” But I am finding it difficult to dig in and deconstruct either the characters or what happens to them, because it all just felt too jumbled.

With My False Heart, Carlyle laid the foundation for her careful architecture of a world in which loving families and the refuge of knowing there’s a place in the universe where you truly belong, mean everything. Orphans and neglected children are made whole through the power of love, and are embraced, not just by their romantic partners, but by Carlyle’s powerfully affecting tableaux of domestic intimacy, even among the privileged and titled families at the center of her world.

Sibling relationships are especially powerful, for good or ill – I fell in love with brother/sister combos like Anisha and her Raju (ruthless Ruthveyn, from One Touch of Scandal), and Kieran and Xanthia Neville, orphaned heirs to a vast shipping fortune (Never Lie to a Lady, Never Romance a Rake). Issues of difference, religion, race, class – it’s all there, and the best of Liz Carlyle delivers complicated characters and angsty historicals you can dig into.  In A Bride By Moonlight, there should be more of the same – both protagonists are crossing over class lines, grappling with questions of duty, honor, and reputation, and overcoming painful losses. I don’t know whether the introduction of the woo-woo Fraternitas stole the mojo or what, but I couldn’t happily go along on their journey, because something isn’t working anymore. I can’t recommend A Bride By Moonlight, but I strongly recommend fans of “meaty” angsty historicals try the “Never” books — my favorite Carlyles and much less cluttered with confusing connected stories.

The more I started re-reading reviews of Carlyle’s books as I thought about this post, the more I realized she has a reputation for taking the connected books craze too far and driving readers crazy with it. For everyone who loves George Kemble (a gay decorator and “fixer” who appears in many books), there seem to be just as many people head-desking over trying to keep track of the connections. Almost everyone seems to agree that My False Heart is an amazing novel, and that the treatment of anti-semitism in Regency England in Never Deceive a Duke is unique and compelling. In many ways, I haven’t got much new to add to what’s already been said, but I decided to go ahead with this post because of what Liz Carlyle’s books have meant to me in the past.

ETA: Lest there be further Carlyle confusion resulting from this post, I should clarify that A Bride By Moonlight is not her most recent release. In Love With a Wicked Man (October 2013) is the newest addition to the Carlyle canon, bringing us the story of Ned Quartermaine, another character who has appeared in many previous books, and I seem to remember he’s not always such a great guy. I haven’t read any reviews (yet) as I’m considering whether to read it…. the set-up seems promising since it takes us out of London and evokes My False Heart by having the hero unavoidably trapped by circumstances at the country estate where he’ll meet the heroine.  Based on my early love of Carlyle’s oeuvre, I know if I see a copy at my local shop, it’ll be coming home with me!

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Reader, they married. What if Jane Eyre were a series?

What if Jane Eyre were a series? Would we like to hang out with the Rochesters as a married couple?

Full disclosure:  I’m not actually going to talk about Mr. & Mrs. Rochester all that much. It’s not a series and Charlotte Bronte didn’t write a “Thornfield Book 2.” So if you are offended by a mild Bait & Switch approach, let me offer my apologies. But there’s another Bronte-esque, moody married couple I have been spending time with lately, and it’s got me thinking…

Back in May I posted about my intoxication with the gothic, Eyre-ish romance of Lady Julia Grey and the maddening, enigmatic Nicholas Brisbane. I’d just finished Book the First in Deanna Raybourn’s Silent trilogy, and it provoked me to indulge in a near-orgy of adulation for this couple as a re-invented post-feminist, mystery-hunting version of the challenging, unequal, yet deeply satisfying romance between Jane and Rochester.

In August, I gobbled up three more tales about Brisbane and Julia, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes these novels work as romances. They’re not published as such but the marketing – especially the original paperback editions (US only? I’m not sure.) – suggests the romance genre and I think they enjoy a wide popularity with romance readers, in addition to the nebulous “women’s fiction” readership and/or lovers of romantic historical fiction.

Having just finished the fourth novel, I am currently visiting with the Brisbanes as newlyweds. They are enjoying what would in a traditional romance be their well-deserved HEA. They’ve had an extended honeymoon across Europe, solved a mystery in India, and are preparing to make their home in England together.

A quick recap: Silent in the Grave (2007) introduced Julia and Nicholas over the dead body of her husband. Secrets emerge, the murder is solved, they get in each other’s way a lot, conversations smolder. Destiny is foretold; gratification delayed. It’s achingly romantic, and I loved it.

In Silent in the Sanctuary (2008), they meet for the first time after a year’s separation when Julia’s father throws them together at a large house party where a murder occurs and everyone is trapped by a heavy snowfall. A classic whodunit-at-a-house-party story. What ensues is a reluctant courtship of sorts, with other potential lovers aplenty and Brisbane nursing — in his inimitably enigmatic way —  all the carefully constructed reasons he ought not to act on his obviously intense attraction and deep emotional connection to Julia. This is Brisbane at his most maddeningly remote.

Silent on the Moor (Lady Julia, #3)With the third novel, we reach the most Bronte-esque of settings when Julia tracks Brisbane to his neglected Yorkshire estate, complete with colorful household staff, a windswpet moor, and a madwoman. Silent on the Moor (2009) is the story — at last — of this couple’s reconciliation and acceptance of their feelings for one another. At last they marry. But Raybourn infuses the conclusion of the Yorkshire book with sufficient uncertainty to leave plenty of room for further romantic tension and conflict in subsequent novels.

Dark Road to Darjeeling (Lady Julia, #4)And of course, this is precisely what we get with the next book, the start of a new, “Dark” trilogy: Dark Road to Darjeeling (2010). I still love this couple, and I’m willing to follow them down at least a few more dark roads.  But I found myself falling out of the story more often as I read, and looking harder at whether it still reads like a romance.

The series is ineffably clever and Raybourn sustained the buildup of romantic tension so well over the first 3 books.  At the same time each novel has its own narrative arc that tracks with many romance conventions.  These include a sudden and/or unexpected meeting, mutual attraction  and romantic entanglement, a dangerous situation, fear for the loved one’s safety, deception of the beloved (often motivated by protective urges), confrontation, betrayal, rejection, reunion, and ultimately a satisfying yet tantalizing expression of love and dedication. The first two such expressions are somewhat oblique, but potently symbolic. While they certainly don’t constitute a traditional HEA, they are enough to scratch the romance-reading itch that demands some kind of declaration by the hero which is accepted by the heroine. In short, although not romance novels, I found I experienced each book in the Silent series as a self-contained “romance read,” and I rejoiced for Julia and her smoldering Gypsy-blueblood husband, when matrimony was finally achieved at the end of the first trilogy.

Dark Road to Darjeeling opens with marital bliss but quickly tears the Brisbanes apart as they receive information about a possible murder and revert to their pre-nuptial behavior of attempting to manipulate each other and exert control over an investigation in which they each have a particular interest. Julia begins a deliberate campaign to prove her worth as an investigator and withholds so much information that the two are at arms length emotionally even when they are physically reunited about halfway into the book. For me, the first inkling that this book was going to be a different sort of read was the fact that early on I became completely annoyed with Julia’s passive aggressive behavior. She’s too often on the verge of sharing useful information with Brisbane, only to withhold it in order to try and do him one better, and it just comes across as spiteful. But was her behavior different from the previous books, or am I holding her accountable differently because he’s her husband now?

To put it another way, is Julia written differently as a wife character, or am I reading her differently as a wife character? Intrepid and strong-minded, or foolhardy and shrewish? Brisbane as a husband strikes me as about the same combination of stubborn inscrutability, ruthless possessiveness and hidden vulnerability, as he did when he was loving Julia from afar — it does come across differently near the end of the book, but a bit more about that anon.

These questions also remind me that there are very successful romance novels where the H/h are married to each other from start to finish (I’m thinking right now of several wonderful historicals by Sherry Thomas, including Not Quite a Husband and Private Arrangements, but there are also contemporary examples such as Ruthie Knox’s recent novella, Making It Last, which is – interestingly – part of a series). So I don’t think what I’m puzzling over is the question of a married romance vs. a romance that ends with marriage. It’s more about the idea of a series — told over the course of multiple books — that follows a couple over the relationship lifespan – how does that work within the romance conventions, or does it? Can I keep coming back to the same couple, even if I do find them quite intoxicating, and receive the same novel-reading pleasure that takes me on an emotional journey to an HEA (or some kind of stand-in for the HEA) — or will it at some point start to wear?

On the up side – with Julia’s married POV, readers can look forward to elegantly circumspect yet deliciously pointed conversations alluding to Brisbane’s …er, appetites, and the sexual and emotional intimacies of the marriage bed. This kind of thing, along with domestic interactions (he takes lots of baths) and discoveries, deepens the emotional impact of their exchanges and their manipulations. Yet the constant push/pull between them started to wear on me somewhere along about the third or fourth time they played out their cycle of intrigue, deception, discovery, confrontation, rupture, confession, reunion…more intrigue…

But this novel can also be read as a portrait of a marriage in the making.  It’s a very young and fragile marriage between two quite mature and willful individuals. Yes, I grew (quite) weary of Julia’s endless attempts to circumvent Brisbane and her self-righteous and unbecoming piques when the shoe is on the other foot and he out-maneuvers her. By the same token, Brisbane’s high-handedness almost started to seem manufactured or arbitrary, a necessary dramatic element to further their romantic tension. Without stepping into spoiler territory, I must say that I found the test he sets Julia at the end of the book held a slight hint of D/s which seemed to come out of nowhere.

But perhaps what makes the book succeed as a romance is that it asserts marriage itself as a series of these narrative arcs. There are absences and chance encounters, intrigues and partnerships, withholding and separations, confrontations and communions, ruptures and renewals. And these cycles can occur more than once in a couple’s journey. I’m pretty sure most people would agree this is true in real life — the question is, do we want to read about these exhilarating (or exhausting, depending on your point of view and/or what’s happening in your personal life) roller coasters when it’s a fictional couple we hold dear?

Leaving aside the issue that they might not have a new mystery to solve every 6 months or so, would we want to read more books chronicling how Jane and Rochester fared?  I think I probably would find them irresistible, and they’d certainly be commercially viable, but Charlotte B may not have wanted to write them.

This may be one of the important ways Brisbane and Julia are NOT like Rochester and Jane – the mysteries provide the opportunity and the means for new chapters of their married story, and their ongoing battle of wills provides the motive to keep reading – and writing – them as romances.

2006 film adaptation of Jane Eyre, an apocryphal final scene

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The Lady Julia Gray series is published by the MIRA imprint of Harlequin. I purchased copies of these first four books at my local used paperback shop. I’m hoping they may have a copy of #5 – The Dark Enquiry when I stop in there this week. If not, it’s going in my Amazon cart, because I’m definitely along for the ride with the Brisbanes, in spite of my quibbles.