Poison or Protect

A stand-alone romance novella set in Gail Carriger???s steampunk universe. Lady Preshea Villentia, a deadly, accomplished assassin, is hired for a job in a country house party. The plot is simple, so the story is self-contained, and the focus is the romance between Lady Villentia and Captain Gavin. Delightfully entertaining and cute.??

Set in the same universe as the Parasol Protectorate and Finishing School series, this features a number of characters from those series, but in terms of its plot, is entirely standalone. It's an erotic romance, switching between the viewpoints of its two main protagonists - one a new character, and the other the school bully from the Finishing School books. Those, of course, are Young Adult, and this, set ten years or so later, is anything but, although it does a good job with getting insider her head and making her more sympathetic.

There is more to the plot than the sex and romance, with an assassination plot against a Tory peer serving as a reason to get the characters together. However, this is almost entirely forgotten by about the half-way point, and the book is too short for the other sub-plots to shine. This means that the story has less of the humour normally associated with books in Parasolverse, although there is some fun at the expense of a lobster. It's very much an adjunct to the rest of the series, rather than particularly effective in its own right - although readers who enjoy romance novels more than I do may feel differently.

This was a follow up to the excellent Finishing School series which was quite YA oriented. This story is definitely for a more mature audience with some rather explicit bedroom descriptions.

To be clear I really enjoyed this story, the depth it added to the main character was moving and extremely well written and added much needed closure for this character.

It was just jarring to read adult scenes about a character that I'd recently been reading about attending school - in the story it was years later and she was already a widow (so no impropriety) however for me it was only a couple of weeks.

So a great story - just a big jump in intended audiences.