The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes

This is the kind of read that swept me up and I finished in a few sittings. I took a while to get into it but man oh man, the MCs stole my heart and I was hooked after the first few chapters. The characters, the time period, the romance, I just love it. A fun read for the weekend that got me doing allll the smiling.

Yes yes yes, more grumpy female MCs (“grumpy” is inadequate shorthand for “person who's been through ridiculous amounts of trauma and is closed off and untrusting because of it,” but we'll go with what we know). Loved the dynamic between the two MCs, didn't love how the end is kind of handwavey about what actually happened with the inheritance and the dukedom and all that and I also just didn't buy the plan for them to become a little crime syndicate with Betty, Kit, Percy, and Rob's mother, since it was so vaguely defined. Knocking off a star for all that, especially because I think this is the last one in the series so those ends are just going to stay loose. Cat Sebastian's writing just makes me happy, though.

This book will make more sense if you read The Queer Principles of Kit Webb first. The two books have overlap and this book starts off where Kit Webb left off. 

There isn't much going on in this book. I didn't see a clear plot. The beginning of this book gives Marian and Rob's perspective of what happened where the first book left off, which I liked. You see their relationship start and we see how the first book played out behind the scenes such as how characters were responsible for actions that set the first book into place. It was over halfway before something was about to happen, but it went just as quickly as it came. 

Overall I enjoyed this story. I's like to see third book to see what mischief all the characters get into together. 

Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Original DNF ‘review' below. Like way, way below considering this review is two and a half pages on my word document.

Trigger warning: I believe Marian was raped prior to the start of this book. I talk about it using that term, the book never does. (I also discuss other aspects of this book, as well as another story, using the term rape.)

There's things I like about this book - and things I really didn't like about this book. But, let's get into what I liked, first.

The Good
One of the reasons that I wanted to give this book another try after I DNF'd it previously (original review below) (and probably the biggest reason after being a fan of the author) was because I kept hearing about aspects of the characters sexuality and, to be honest, sex scenes.

Both characters are bi - which is, sadly, not something that I believe it all the common in f/m romances. (I don't read a lot of them, but I don't even hear about many where one or both of the leads are bi.)

Marian has a health issue that means if she gets pregnant again, she will almost certainly die. (It was, truly, a shock to everyone that she didn't die with her pregnancy, as it was.) This means that the standard penetrative sex is the be all end all has to be non-existent. And, in fact, Rob pretty much says that that type of sex isn't even his first choice, really. And goes on to add that he was often on the receiving end when he was with other men. Which makes Marian very...interested. (I was kind of hoping for a pegging scene, not going to lie. We didn't get it, but there are remarks that makes me pretty sure that Marian is going to buy Rob a glass cock and fuck him with it.)

During their sex scenes - most intimate scenes, in fact - Rob definitely shows major signs of being submissive and has a giant, glowing sign that says he has a praise kink. (And Marian actually, surprising me, makes a decent soft domme.) (I desperately want more submissive men in f/m romances without falling into the hardcore, leather and whip wielding dommes.) (I'm going to be honest: I have searched for f/m romances with submissive men, but with the distrust I have for the recommended lists on goodreads that I have, and my definition of submissive or even beta men being, apparently, so different from others, it is hard for me to find.)

I do kind of like Rob. (Caveat because of something I will mention later.)

I do also kind of like that Marian has trauma and it's not just magically solved. (More on this later, too.)

Also, I loved the ending. And by the ending, I mean, literally, the epilogue. Those last few pages/minutes where I feel like we are a found family of crime makes me unaccountably happy.


The Neutral

While it is distressingly accurate, Marian is constantly aware that the only thing keeping Rob from raping her is his own decency. She doesn't trust that decency all the time, because she has been raped before. (The book doesn't SAY that, but how else am I supposed to take it when she basically thinks to herself that she told her husband that she didn't want something sexually and he did it anyway?) While I do think that this was handled in an accurate manner, really, it also very depressing for me. Marian's character arc is less ‘healing' and more ‘it's okay to not be okay' - which is valid and something that a lot of people deal with. It's just a little too much reality sneaking into what I thought was going to be a fluffy, frothy ‘be bi, do crimes' sort of book.

Consent is a BIG thing in this book. Which makes a certain aspect of the plot distressingly, glaringly obvious.


The Bad

The ‘banter' - specifically towards the beginning of the book. I did not find it funny, it was more insufferable than anything else. For me to really approve of banter, I need to feel a softness to it that, until probably a third to half of the way through, I did not feel here.

Marian. Because she was so prickly and disapproving through the first part of the book (and does, truly stay that way) by the time she started to unbend a little, show something besides her teeth and claws all the time, it was too late and I didn't care for her. She does grow on me a bit, but Even by the end, I cannot say that I actually like her.

Finally, probably actually the biggest issue I had:

Rob lies to Marian about who he is during the period of time that they are having sex. He even thinks to himself that he should tell her, but does not because it is too difficult. When you don't know who someone really is, you can't really fully consent to having sex with them. Sure, you can consent to having sex with a stranger - because you're both aware that you're strangers. You can consent to having sex at one of those sex clubs with the blindfolds and the masks and not actually knowing who you are having sex with - because you are consenting to not know who you are having sex with and everyone is on the same page. Rob and Marian are NOT on the same page. Marian is consenting to sex with Rob thinking she knows who he is (or, at least, who he isn't) and he is in possession of information about who he is that he is not sharing with her.

This is developing into a pattern in Sebastian's books. It has happened twice. She has only written three f/m romances to date. And it has happened twice.

I will state this is not as bad as the other book of Sebastian's that does this, because I think that Marian would have still consented if she had the full information. (No, I do not believe the other woman in question would have, which, yes, makes that book rape but not this book.) (And, yes, I do hate that I have to have levels of this in my romance books when all I really want is a sweet, consensual romance.)

(I want to talk about something else real quick. I am into interactive fiction. There's this one WiP that I am obsessed with. In it you play - well, Mordred. A child of incest. His father (Arthur (yes, that Arthur)) and mother (Morgana) were half siblings. Now, this is handled in various ways in various versions and retellings. The way it's handled in that one is that Morgana knew who Arthur was when they had sex but he did not know who she was. He consented, but not knowing who she was at the time makes that consent questionable at best. (Of course, in this story the consent is rendered null and void because we have proof from Arthur that if he had known who Morgana was, he would have never consented to having sex with her, which means she raped him.))

The thing I'm getting at here is, if you are lying to someone about who you are and they consent to having sex with you, the consent is questionable at best because they are not in possession of all the facts.

(Why this wasn't dealt with a quarter of the way through the book, before they ever had sex, I'll never know. Especially because it wouldn't actually change any aspect of the story other than one conversation where someone other than Rob told Marian the truth first.)

(Random question: This is supposed to be a vague Robin Hood inspired/retelling thing, apparently. So who is the Sheriff?)




Original, DNF ‘review'

DNF - PG 58

Why?

(I do honestly want to tr this book again at a later date, but right now, it's just not working for me.)

So, I was super excited for this book. I mean so, so excited. I loved Marian in the first book and thought this would be so much fun. ... It's not.

I know it's supposed to be funny. I'm supposed to find Marian and (to a lesser extent) Rob's internal monologues amusing, at least if not straight up hilarious. But, honestly, it's exhausting reading these characters and trying to find them funny instead of flat out getting annoyed with them.

This is the ‘funny' moment I just never got over:

‘In her mind, she would have to think of him as Rob, and she held him fully responsible for not being a person one could think of in a sensible way.'

Prior to this, there are so many instances of Marian (especially) and Rob (to a slightly lesser extent) thinking that they need to take everyone (Marian) or at least Marian (Rob) in hand because they've made such a mess of everything. (Yes, that is not a typo.) This is especially jarring when Marian thinks that she's made a mess of all her plans and what seems like two pages later she's thinking about how she'll run away to the continent and direct her father and her step-son and her brother's(?) lives from there because they obviously cannot look after themselves and she's so much better at making plans than they are.

Honestly, this is just the sort of ‘amusing' romance monologues that I have a hard time with.

(Sigh This upsets me because there's a couple of things I discovered upon reading reviews to see if I was the only one with this problem (as far as I cold tell, I am) that I really, really want to read about in here re: their sexuality and their sex scenes.) (Also, when I called Marian a disaster bisexual after, like, ten pages, I had no idea how right I was.)