Angel in a Devil’s Arms is the second book in Julie Anne Long’s Palace of Rogues series, and it is adorable. I loved basically everything about it, from the ensemble of ‘found family’ at the Palace of Rogues, to the humour, to the sweetness and intimacy of Lucien’s conversations with Angelique, and most especially to the subversion of several very Old Skool tropes which are beyond ready to be retired.

You don’t really need to read Lady Derring Takes a Lover to enjoy this story (though you might as well, because it is also excellent fun), though you should know that Angel in a Devil’s Arms does contain one mild spoiler for the previous book, since we begin by discovering just who it was that hired the Palace’s best room by sending a supercilious stranger with a large sum of money and a mysterious token.

That person is the same person who left the following message in the betting book at Whites:

I wager every penny I possess I will have revenge – BOLT.

And lest you think this message is insufficiently sinister, allow me to inform you that Lucien Durand, Lord Bolt, the bastard son of the Duke of Brexford, drowned in the Thames ten years ago.

…or rather, everyone thought he did. In fact, Lucien was fished out of the Thames by a passing ship and put to work, and has spent the last ten years making his fortune, in the best tradition of 19th century heroes who have been shipped off to foreign parts.

Ah, Lucien. I am very fond of Lucien but he is such a drama llama. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he has good reasons to be feeling vengeful (let’s just say that he didn’t get into the Thames of his own volition), but in the early part of the book he does not miss a single opportunity to be dramatic, mysterious, portentous, and occasionally smouldering. One gets the sense that he is really *enjoying* being the villain in his own personal melodrama.

He had once cared that he did not fit anywhere.

Until he’d learned that he could use this to his advantage.

He was not in the business of making anyone feel more comfortable about anything.

This is, if anything, an understatement. Lucien positively revels in making people uncomfortable. Not to put too fine a point on it, at the start of the book, he’s a jerk, and he thoroughly enjoys being a jerk.

Angelique, conversely, has made a vocation of making people comfortable, and she will not be having with Lucien’s nonsense.

“My friend Mrs Hardy and I founded The Grand Palace on the Thames from what was essentially a ruin. It is thriving beyond our wildest dreams, for which we are grateful. It is our home. We cherish – I see your eyebrow has twitched at the word, but nonetheless – our guests, and we find that their comfort is owed in large part to the company they find here. We take great pride in their enjoyment of each other. And furthermore, I like these people. I fear I cannot tolerate hearing them insulted or witnessing them made to feel uncomfortable when you know better. It pains me greatly.”

Angelique is a woman of experience, most of it bad. As a governess, she was seduced and abandoned; as a seamstress, she eloped with her lover, who ruined her again, and then married someone else. Lacking respectable employment, she became Lord Derring’s mistress, and was left destitute at his death. Only her fortunate meeting and subsequent alliance with Lord Derring’s widow, Delilah (now Mrs Hardy), have brought her to a point where she has any peace or comfort in her life, and she values this peace extremely highly. She does not want ‘to feel feelings’, she does not want to be notorious, and the fact that she finds Lucien attractive only makes him someone to avoid at all costs.

This is a romance, so you know how that’s going to work out for her.

I’ll be honest, I went into this book feeling very leery of the whole premise. I do not like stories where someone is out for revenge, because it tends to bring out the worst in people, especially heroes. Everyone else’s needs and feelings tend to get trampled on in the quest for revenge, and the grovelling is never sufficient to make up for it.

I am glad to say that does not happen here, mostly for two reasons.

The first is that, while Lucien is serious about his revenge, there is almost a playfulness to how he goes about it. As far as I can see, his grand plan for revenge is to ‘haunt’ and scare the people who were responsible for his trip into the Thames, and also to open a gaming house and name it The Duchess of Brexford’s Den of Iniquity. And that’s it. The Duchess does, indeed, deserve some kind of comeuppance, and gets it, as do the other offenders, but as revenges go, this is relatively mild stuff.

The second is that Lucien abandons his vengeful plans pretty quickly once he falls for Angelique. In fact, the thing that makes me love Lucien is that as soon as he realises that he loves Angelique, he immediately sets about using the same skills he used to make people uncomfortable to start setting them at ease, to create a new reputation for himself as a civilised, reasonable, pleasant man, the sort of person that nobody would write articles about in the broadsheets. It’s a conscious and deliberate change of direction, because he knows that the things Angelique values most are peace, quiet, and not being the centre of scandal, and if he wants to be with her, he needs to stop being notorious and become respectable.

The idea of a wild and uncontrollable man being civilised by a woman is an old one – I mean, it’s even in the epic of Gilgamesh (and the civilising woman in that saga has a Past, too), and it’s problematic for a few reasons. But in fact, that is subverted here; Angelique doesn’t civilise Lucien, though she does require that he treats the other guests with respect. It is Lucien who decides to civilise himself in order to be a person that Angelique can dare to be with. In some ways, it’s not so much about becoming civilised, it’s about growing up (though he certainly maintains his sense of play in other areas of life).

Angelique and Lucien have an extremely strong mutual attraction, which Angelique absolutely doesn’t want. After their first kiss, Angelique shuts things down quite firmly.

“Not even your considerable charms are inducement enough to threaten my hard-won contentment.” […]

“Well, clearly my charms are not nearly as formidable as I thought they were,” he said, finally. “I shall proceed to get drunk and brood.”

“A time-honoured way to ease shattering disappointment, I’m given to understand.”

That she should go on being beautiful, and go on saying things like that, things that delighted him even as she thoroughly rejected him, seemed too cruel.

But then it got worse.

“I should like it if we could be friends, Lord Bolt.”

She sounded appallingly sincere.

Lucien is appalled, but not for as long as you might think, because it turns out a large part of his attraction to Angelique comes from the fact that he really likes her. They are both intelligent, slightly cynical people, with a dry, ironic sense of humour, and it doesn’t take long for Lucien to decide that ‘he was going to be the best damned friend Mrs Breedlove ever had.’ And indeed, after a surprisingly short time Lucien realises that he values her friendship enough that he wouldn’t want to give it up, even for the chance to sleep with her.

In fact, friendship is one of the central themes of the book, and I really adore the friendship between Angelique and Lucien. Their banter is snarky and delightful from the start, but their conversations quickly develop an intimacy and deep emotional honesty that comes from a shared experience of pain and betrayal and loss. They have been betrayed and harmed in different ways, but the emotional impact is the same, and they recognise that in each other. When it comes to their relationship, Lucien is more open to risk than Angelique, but then, his wealth, birth, and gender all provide him with a safety net that Angelique does not have.

As she tells Lucien:

I’m capable of saying no to things that are delicious but unwise. This is something every woman learns the hard way. The consequences for us are always greater. And men never consider that at all because they don’t have to.

And even when Lucien tries to promise that he will never hurt her, Angelique refuses to hold him to a promise that it may be impossible for him to keep.

But the friendship between Angelique and Lucien is far from the only friendship in the book. The foundation without which the story could not happen is the friendship between Angelique and Delilah, but Angelique’s friendships with Delilah’s new husband, their maid, Dot, and with the various guests of the house are all essential to the story. As far as the guests are concerned, it’s almost a ‘found family’ situation – perhaps not all of them are people who Delilah and Angelique would have chosen as friends, but they love them and accept their many quirks, and they enjoy caring for them. Late in the book, when Angelique is struggling with her feelings for Lucien, Delilah tells her:

“You are safe to feel anything you please, because if those emotions should knock you off course, why, everyone who lives here will right you again.”

It is these friendships which make it possible for Angelique to take emotional risks, because she no longer risks losing all her emotional connections if this one fails.

I won’t claim that both characters behave perfectly throughout the book – Angelique is very much once bitten, twice shy, and as a result, she behaves rather unfairly to Lucien after they first become physically intimate. And Lucien responds to this by lashing out with some fairly low blows. But they do keep coming back to that shared sense of integrity and respect for each other, and that inconvenient liking, and one never truly believes that they won’t work it out. And one desperately wants them to do so, because they so clearly bring out the best in each other.

One thing I enjoyed very much was the way Long subverted that tired old trope where the Hero finds out something Scandalous about the Heroine’s past and Defends Her Honour. Because this does happen, and it goes horribly and predictably wrong – by Defending Her Honour, all Lucien does is confirm the truth of the rumour and make things worse, and Angelique is justifiably furious as a result. To give him credit, Lucien realises almost instantly that he has done precisely the wrong thing, and does what he can to fix it, but I really, really appreciated that this was portrayed as ‘Lucien loses his temper and does something stupid’ rather than ‘Lucien Heroes Heroically!’ There is a strong thread of feminist commentary in this book – indeed, the fact that the heroine of the story is a Fallen Woman and former mistress is a bit of a feminist statement in itself – and also a real sense of pragmatism. How would all these staples of romantic drama really work out for all involved in the real world?

The story is deliciously funny, in a way that really grounds the romance and makes it feel more real. Lucien’s internal voice is very snarky, particularly when contemplating his fellow boarders.

Strategy often began with Delacorte, who could be counted on to enthusiastically run a topic into the ground, or spread it around the room like cholera.

(Poor old Delacorte is a very recurrent source of comic relief in the story, who can be relied upon to say or do the most inappropriate thing possible at any given moment, but it always comes with the kindest of intentions – his manners may be dreadful, but in fact at the start of the book he compares favourably with Lucien, whose manners are exquisite, but whose treatment of others leaves much to be desired.)

But there are also magnificently humorous scenes, such as the one where all the boarding house guests and staff are somehow persuaded into pretending to be pirates.

“All right, then,” Lucien said briskly. “To set the scene convincingly, we shall need all of you to be pirates. Everyone stand up and make a good deal of frightening noise.”

Dot leaped immediately to her feet and bellowed, “BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAK!”

[…] “It was the most frightening noise I could think of,” she explained, meekly.

After a long moment of regarding her with a sort of gleeful wonderment, Bolt said: “Perhaps I should have been more specific.”

And yet, only a few lines later, we have this:

It had felt like a calling, for a mad moment: simply helping her up. It occurred to him that whatever she needed, no matter what it was, he’d be too happy to provide. Holding her hand had seemed absurdly profound. Laughably so. It brought home to go that something about her had indeed stripped him down to a strange, raw newness. As if he was once again a green boy quivering at the very thought of the touch of a female. His thoughts careened between resentment and bemused wonderment, but came to rest on one certainty: even if he never experienced the glory of touching the rest of her, he’d still rush to help her up if she should ever stumble. If she should ever need him. No matter when. No matter where.

*swooooooon*

For me, this ability to pivot between humour and emotional intensity is one of the great strengths of the book. The story walks a fine line between melodrama and farce, without ever quite falling into either, and each side heightens the effect of the other. There is a lot of tragedy and pain in both Lucien and Angelique’s back stories, and it would be easy to dwell on this, but instead it is undercut by the mundane humour of vulgar houseguests and clumsy maids and reenactments of sea battles with pirates and invisible swords, which both makes the painful aspects more tolerable, and the emotions themselves feel more grounded in the real world.

(Actually the pirate reenactment scene is particularly masterful, as it goes from farce to sweetness to drama to high romance all in the space of a few pages and with only a few people in the room truly aware of all the nuances of what is happening.)

I can’t think of a clever way to end this review. I’m sure it’s obvious that I loved this book, and enjoyed spending time with both the heroes and the minor characters. There is a lengthy epilogue which sets the scene for the next book in the series, and to my mind that bit was more prolonged than it needed to be, but that really is the only fault I can find in an otherwise delightful book. Angel in a Devil’s Arms was just enormous fun to read. It’s sweet, it’s sexy, it’s fun, and it’s just a little bit subversive. Highly recommended.