Book Review

Mad About the Marquess by Elizabeth Essex

I read Mad about the Marquess while at RT 2016, and the book was so good that it left me having sweaty anxiety about wanting to hide and read and go to all the panels all at the same time. Fortunately I was among my people at RT so sweaty reading anxiety is something everyone understood.

“Elyse! Why are you sweating and breathing hard?”
“I AM CRAMMING AS MUCH READING AS POSSIBLE INTO EVERY SPARE MINUTE HERE GODDAMNIT!”
“Understood. Let me get you a bottle of water.”

Anyway, the reason I was reading in line, while walking, when I should have been asleep, is Mad About the Marquess is some serious Elyse catnip. It features:

  1. A heroine who decides to become a highwayman because of course she does.
  2. A staid Scottish hero who is really isn’t all that staid.
  3. Sass wars.
  4. A heroine named Lady Quince Winthrop.

I will get into a white panel van with tinted windows if you tell me that book is inside.

The heroine of this story is Lady Quince Winthrop. I will fight anyone who tells me that isn’t the best goddamn name ever. Lady Quince is very good at being very bad. She cheats at cards, sets up a running dice game with the gardeners, and steals valuables from the gentry. She commits larceny for a pretty good reason, though. Quince feels intense guilt about waves of dispossessed crofters coming to Edinburgh just to starve on the streets:

Wholesale evictions were what they were, made by landlords eager to “improve” their agricultural yields by turning arable land into more profitable pasturage for sheep. West Kirk workhouse was about as far as people made destitute by dispossession could get.

And it was there that Quince’s ill gotten gains were turned into very well spent assistance. She loved the deeply ironic symmetry of it all–stealing from the very people who owned the land and had dispossessed their crofters so they could make more money, and using that stolen money to finance a new start for those crofters.

Justice was indeed blind, and daft to boot, if you asked her. Which nobody did.

Quince is at a party, stealing silver buttons and ear bobs when she runs into Alasdair, Marquees of Carin (she runs into him literally, so she can steal the buttons off the back of his red velvet coat). Cairn is back in Edinburgh because he’s been asked to catch the thief who is robbing the gentry of their snuff boxes and other trinkets. Cairn and Quince know each other–he courted her older sister–and immediately engage in a major flirtation and also sass wars. There is banter. It’s witty. It’s like witty banter foreplay.

Cairn is a brawny, russet haired *COUGH SAM HEUGHAN COUGH* hottie, btw.

Cairn doesn’t know Quince is the thief but he suspects she’s up to something. For her part, realizing the jig is most likely up, Quince decides she needs to escalate and get a lot of money right now so she can bow out of the petty larceny. So she disguises herself as a highwayman and robs some coaches. Like you do. Then Cairn accidentally shoots her and well, shit gets real.

This book is delightful. It’s actually fucking delightful now I think about it, which is like delightful times ten. The dialogue is wonderful and sass wars are just about my favorite thing ever. The plot is just enough crazysauce layered on top of historical goodness. There was literally nothing about Mad About the Marquess that I didn’t like.

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Mad About the Marquess by Elizabeth Essex

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  1. Riikka says:

    This sounds very good. I think I need to look this book up! Sass wars are the best. 🙂

  2. TheoLibrarian says:

    Lady Quince sounds like the perfect antidote to the book featuring a super Mary Sue heroine that I just finished. Elizabeth Essex is so great!

    Thanks, Elyse! I’m always happy to benefit from your sweaty reading anxiety.

  3. RevMelinda says:

    I am a big Elizabeth Essex fan. Her book “Almost A Scandal” is one of my favorite books ever. However, I just didn’t enjoy this one, and if I were assigning a grade it would probably be a B- or a C. I had some issues with Quince (really she is very silly indeed, and had me rolling my eyes over and over), but honestly what really got to me was the writing, which seemed very repetitive. For example, Essex’s use of the word “wee,” mostly linked to Quince’s name, as in “Wee Quince.” It really got to me after a while and I would kind of wince when I read it. I so, so wanted a red pen to remove some of those “wee”s! Another phrase that I found tiresome was “magnificent breasts” (and somehow those breasts were both “wee” and “magnificent”). Sigh. The e-book that I read also had multiple errors in it. The book just seemed like it could have benefited from some more editing. Probably as a result of all the repetitiveness I had trouble engaging with the book and put it down multiple times, considered just abandoning it, but persisted–and found the second half to be pretty engaging (things do sort of pick up after Quince is shot). So–as with everything, your mileage may vary.

  4. Hmmn. Interesting comment. Now you’ve got me curious! I too love Elizabeth Essex’s books — in large part because in previous books the characters handle conflict with intelligence and wit. I will have to check this out to see.
    Though I agree that editing errors are like nails on chalkboard 🙁

  5. Crystal says:

    Do want…payday tomorrow. Oh, well. The Unleashing is keeping me happy anyway.

  6. lora says:

    @RevMelinda, I haven’t read it but now I need to know if her breasts are magnificent because they are so very wee? Like, impressively teensy?

  7. Konst. says:

    If you want to try it out, the prequel “Mad for Love” is FREE on amazon 🙂

  8. Theresa says:

    Read this yesterday based on this review and liked it a lot. Maybe not an A for me, but definitely a B. The wee Quince went on my nerves a bit, too, but I managed to get over it and it didn’t disturb me too badly.
    I also got the free prequel, which was absolutely adorable. It’s a retelling of the Audrey Hepburn heist movie ‘How to steal a million’ with a French heroine and a Scottish hero set in London. If you have seen the movie, you know how the story is going to play out, but it was cute none the less.
    The excerpt for the next book also sounds very promising. It has the ‘engaged because of family connections’ trope, which is catnip for me! Definitely going to continue this series.

  9. ClaireC says:

    Pre-order this one and am so excited to read it! Just finished the last (?) in the Reckless Brides series and was about to go back to her earlier books. I love how smart and capable her heroines are and how the heroes are totally on board with that. It was great to learn all the navy/ship stuff as well – her passion and research really show!

  10. Read this based on SBTB review and loved it too (and agree that a bunch a bunch of wee’s should have been given the axe, but I started to mentally skip them and it didn’t hinder my reading after the first couple chapters.).

    Thanks for the rec!

  11. J says:

    I am having a hard time with this one. I liked the prequel a lot, and maybe I’d like this story told better in novella form. Or as a caper movie. The writing is great, plot is fun. It’s me, not the book. The problem is that “wee” Quince (at 45% point) has some real issues and I am not liking spending so much time inside the head of a kleptomaniac with impulse control issues. Cairn is too hot to be stuck with that! Maybe I’m just old and staid. Maybe Quince will get therapeutic help by the end of the book.

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