Murder by Death

I started off confused; for some reason I had it in my head that this book was going to take place in London and centre around Lord Gage (Kiera's soon to be father-in-law), so when the story opens in Edinburgh and Lord Gage was nowhere to be found it felt like I picked up the wrong book.

Once I got past that and settled into the story, I enjoyed it, although I had concerns the author was writing herself into a corner: Lord Gage does appear about a third of the way through and boy is he an ass.  Certifiable, no redeeming qualities ass and he doesn't like Kiera at all.  This set-up felt like a trite attempt at creating a crise de cœur between Kiera and Gage at best, and at worst, a totally unrealistic set-up for Kiera to "win-over" and redeem her future father-in-law.  Either of these scenarios was going to disappoint me after the quality of the story-telling in the first three books.

I should have had more faith; Ms. Huber takes neither of these paths and instead makes the hero more heroic and Kiera's future more realistic, if less HEA.  Sometimes, you have to take the ass to get the prince.

As to the actual mystery - I liked it a lot!  The author presented several viable suspects and an ingenious method of poison delivery, as well as quite a few red-herrings that didn't look like red-herrings.  I didn't sort it out until just before Kiera did and it was someone I never gave a thought to suspecting.  I love it when that happens!

I love this series and of the four published so far there hasn't been a bad one yet.  It'll be a long year of waiting to see what happens next.