Narrated by Derek Perkins
I’ve read and/or listened to all the books in Kerrigan Byrne’s Victorian Rebels series, and I hate to say it, but I think it’s running – has run – out of steam. The first two or three were very good – The Highwayman (book one) continues to be my favourite of the series, with The Hunter a close second – but books four to six have been distinctly lacklustre, and I think that had it not been for the fact that Derek Perkins is one of my favourite narrators and I’ll always jump at the chance to listen to him performing an historical romance novel, I might well have given up on it by now.
When I started The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (and don’t get me started on the penchant for derivative titles in HR these days!), I thought – at first – that at last, here was a return to the gripping storytelling of The Highwayman, but after a very strong opening and first few chapters, things start to fizzle out; the rest of the plot is tissue-paper thin, the central relationship is almost completely recycled from book one, the principals are bland and underdeveloped and there are large chunks in the middle of the book where nothing much happens.
The hero of this story is the Rook, the infamous pirate who played a key role in the previous book (The Scot Beds his Wife), and in what’s become the typically strong, impactful opening for the books in this series, we meet him in younger – if not happier – days and witness the traumatic event that is going to shape him as a man and shape his future. Anyone who has read the earlier books will quickly work out his true identity, but I won’t reveal it here.
So… beaten and believed dead, our hero miraculously survives and claws his way out of a pauper’s grave, crawling his way to the side of the road, where he is rescued by the Earl of Southbourne and his two children, Mortimer (a sadistic bastard) and fourteen-year-old Lorelai, who takes in wounded animals and nurses them back to health. For the better part of a year, ‘Ash’ – as she names him, (he has no memory of his past or who he is) – remains with the family while Lorelai takes care of him and he recovers his strength… but not his memory. The awkwardness and tenderness of first love are really well conveyed as Ash and Lorelai come to trust and understand each other – but their world is shattered one day when Ash leaves and never comes back.
Twenty years later, when Lorelai is about to be married off to a fat old lord in order to pay off her brother’s debts, a heavily cloaked man turns up at her wedding and murders Mortimer (who is still a sadistic bastard) in plain view of everyone and then whisks Lorelai and her sister-in-law away to his luxurious pirate vessel. No prizes for guessing the identity of murderous brute in black. Yep – it’s Ash – who has reinvented himself as the Rook – come to keep his promise to come for Lorelai, no matter what. It’s taken him twenty years – fifteen of them as a slave, the rest as a pirate – but he’s never forgotten his first love and now he’s back to claim her.
From here on in though, the book loses steam at an alarming rate and doesn’t really pick up until the last few chapters, when a couple of very interesting reunions take place. In fact, the first one of these was pretty much the high point of the book for me – which is a pretty sad thing to say about a romance novel if you think about it – and the second keeps the questions coming about Carlton Morley, whose book I’ve been waiting for since The Hunter and who is pretty much the only reason I’m still following this series! The two principals are fairly bland; other than Lorelai’s penchant for healing wounded creatures, we know very little about her and the Rook is very quickly revealed to be all bluster and not much substance. As in The Highwayman, there’s that whole “she’s been the one light in his darkness over the years” thing going on, but it was better treated in that book and this is just a pale imitation of it. There’s a newly introduced and charismatic secondary character who had a lot of potential (and who I’m convinced will be the hero of the next book) – but who turns villainous just to inject a bit of dramatic tension into the story – which doesn’t really work as we’re way too close to the end of the book for anything to go seriously wrong with the HEA.
Ms. Byrne’s writing is strong and impactful – her prose is lush and intense, and it’s always been a bit flowery, but that latter tendency is becoming more and more exaggerated as the series progresses, and I noted many, many eye-rolling, hyperbolic phrases like these:
“In taking you, I always knew I would corrupt you. Break you. Destroy you.”
Or
… until ecstasy pulsed from her womb, to her bones, and sang through her blood.
Or
She released a rush of wet need on a tortured moan.
This is one of those cases when less would most definitely be more.
As has been the case with the previous couple of books, The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo’s biggest draw was Derek Perkins, who I know can be relied upon to provide a strong, intuitive performance of whatever book he reads. Sadly, the romance genre is letting him down at the moment, as I can’t recall the last time I heard him narrate a story that was worthy of his considerable talent. Here, he somehow manages to mute the purplest of the prose to a degree, possibly because every sentence he utters is full of the sort of conviction that communicates itself to the listener; you believe it because he’s saying it. His pacing is excellent, his characterisations appropriate and the narrative portions of the story are expressive and subtly nuanced. The Rook is given an appropriately smooth yet largely unemotional tone throughout the majority of the story, which works well to delineate a man who has no memory of his past and professes to be devoid of emotion, and Mr. Perkins differentiates expertly between all the male characters, especially in the later scenes which feature characters we’ve met before such as Blackwell and Morley. His female voices are good, too – Lorelai is softly spoken but can be fierce when she has to be, and it’s easy to tell her dialogue from that of Lady Veronica, her sister-in-law, whose voice is just a little bit lower in pitch than Lorelai’s.
If you’re following the Victorian Rebels series in audio, then I suspect you may want to pick up The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo for the sake of completeness – although in all honestly, I can’t really recommend it for anything other than the narration.
Caz
Buy The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo by Kerrigan Byrne on Amazon
