3.5 ʀᴏᴜɴᴅᴇᴅ ᴜᴘ-

A Restless Truth is the second book of The Last Binding trilogy. This time, the story follows Maud Blyth (Robin's sister, from A Marvellous Light) as she continues Robin and Edwin's task of trying to find the remaining parts of The Last Contract. She forms a kind of ragtag group to help her-featuring one other familiar face, Jack Alston/Lord Hawthorn, and new faces like professional family disaster Violet Debenham and journalist/thief extraordinaire Alan Ross.

I have to know if Freya Marske was in a Titanic phase while writing this book because there are enough easter eggs to make me wonder - LOL. (FMC with a flower name (Rose/Violet) who doesn't want to live the stereotypical womanly life, traveling on a white star line ship in the early 1900s, falling in love on the ship, all while avoiding danger including near falls overboard, framed for theft, and hiding in vehicles in the cargo hold.)

Things I liked:

• I HAVE SUCH A CRUSH ON VIOLET. Did I pick her as my favorite character because of her as a character or because I'm in love with her? The world may never know.

• I loved how this book made me really enjoy Lord Hawthorn. I didn't hate him, exactly, after the first book - but I definitely didn't care/wasn't interested in him. But I love him now and I'm excited that the next book follows him.

Things I didn't like:

• I fell into a slump reading this. I think the mystery side of things got to be really slow/dragged out (boring) and I'm disappointed that we didn't get to go deeper into the Violet/Maud romance. I wish we would have focused more on them and built up their relationship more. In AML, I felt like Robin and Edwin were really fleshed out as a romantic pairing by the end of that book, but Violet and Maud feel very disconnected and unfinished--as if their story should be continuing in the next book (and maybe it will, but we already know that Hawthorn is the primary character in the next one, so I don't have my hopes very high). I'm really disappointed because I loved Robin and Edwin's chemistry and I was looking forward to reading that kind of romance on a sapphic side of things. ( )

More gay porn, this time Sapphic on an Atlantic crossing. I was hoping that the body on ice would involve an iceberg.

Unranked.

Maud Blythe has always longed for adventure and now she's in the middle of one. Going by ship to New York to warn one of the members of the Forsythia club that there are things afoot. Posing as her companion on the way back isn't hard, for her to turn up dead on the first day at sea is. Violet is an actress and trying to outrage her family completely but she's trying to reconcile with them, to a degree. Investigating a murder with Maud isn't her best move to placate them, falling for Maud as well is muddying the waters.
The characters really sparkled and right after reading this one I was onto the next book. It's going to be tough to choose which series I decide is best. ( )

This book is good I just read it on loan and didn't finish it so I'm officially unshelving it until I get a real copy.

Very good and exciting. The ship based magical mystery I needed right now. I'll admit I was thoroughly confused at first about anything the referenced the first book. It'd been a long time since I'd read the first book and I couldn't remember a good chunk of it off the top of my head. After a while though, things started making sense and I had a lot of "oh yeah that happened" moments. I liked that at any given time I could be surprised by something new, but not in the same way that some mystery type books like to blindside you with the truth. Definitely worth it, and glad I finally got to read it. ( )