This guest review is by Claudia.
A bit about Claudia:
“At sixteen, I found my older cousin’s stash of Barbara Cartlands and assorted Harlequin-type romance housed in an old sewing cabinet and life was never the same! I love history, so I mostly read historical romance. Favorite authors include Meredith Duran, Mary Balogh, Miranda Neville, Elizabeth Kingston, and Rose Lerner.”
(An earlier bio mis-attributed, and is totally the fault my non-caffeinated, mixed-up brain. Sorry! – Sarah)
…
I rarely read contemporary romance, and I’m not a big fan of thrillers. When I discovered that Sandra Antonelli’s At Your Service features rarely-seen-in-romance older main characters, though, I was instantly on board.
I am very glad I went out of my comfort zone.
At Your Service is the first book in Antonelli’s In Service trilogy, which features Mae Valentine, a retired butler, and Kitt, a retired British Army major who works in risk assessment. Mae is about 50, and Kitt is five years younger.
Some three years before the start of the book, Mae and Kitt struck an unusual arrangement. Mae is Kitt’s landlady, as he rents a flat adjacent to her house, but also his employee. Mae came out of retirement to be Kitt’s butler (he travels frequently for work).
The attraction between the two is there from the start, but neither acts on it. They keep their relationship very cordial and comfortable enough to exchange clever, good-humored banter that never comes across as petulant back-and-forth.
Here’s Kitt explaining his reasons to not rock the boat:
He was not unaware of the affection, of the connection he felt for Mae, but egocentricity was fundamental to his way of life. As complicated as he’d made things, as much trouble as she had suddenly become, he was no longer able to ignore what he always had, and it had little to do with her scrambled eggs.
Mae is much more than a superb butler (not a housekeeper, she says) and cook, though. She’s a smart woman, a sensual being, and someone who copes remarkably well with the complete upending of her neat and tidy life after she becomes unwittingly involved in an international criminal enterprise.
High standards are important to Mae, as is holding on to the memory of her husband, a master gardener from Sicily. Mae has been widowed for 16 years, and at the beginning of the book she has just found out that her husband left her untold millions in a trust. She had no idea the trust existed. After a mugging that quickly proves to be more than that and an attempt at Mae’s life (featuring the deadly use of a toilet brush), Mae and Kitt have to figure out why someone wants her dead.
The romance is slow burn, as Mae and Kitt take things very slowly, which I imagine would be the way I would go about it if I were witnessing murder, getting into all kinds of scrapes, and having to defend myself with cleaning implements. I felt a strong kinship with Mae when she, at the height of her predicament, turned to ironing to feel less rattled. Kitt is a great character, a man trying to remain human while doing a tough job, for all that he talks about his “black soul.”
Not being a fan of spy novels, James Bond movies, and the like, I am certain that I missed quite a few half-hidden references to those, but I spotted one delightful, tongue-in-cheek exchange in which Kitt references Bond’s housekeeper.
Kitt owns up to his feelings for Mae early on, but Mae has a longer journey to take. She is not only holding tight to the memory of her husband and her comfy routines, she is also appalled that Kitt’s job turns out to be about a lot more than “risk assessment.” And, as she puts it, she doesn’t want to love another dead man.
Here’s Mae describing her doubts:
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to respond or react or what to think about this, about you.”
Kitt dipped his head. “What you and I do. It’s not that different. We both clean up after someone’s made a mess. (…) You have to trust me, Mae. I followed you here because you were a loose end. You’re a very loose end. But there are things I am not able to tell you, actions I am not able to talk about. Ever. You have to trust me and let me do what it is I do.”
Mae has to come to terms with what she learns about Kitt, about her husband, who turns out to have had secrets of his own, and about the criminal ring. She also worries that she’s becoming ‘bloodthirsty.”
As I mentioned, At Your Service is the first of three books featuring Mae and Kitt (there’s also a prequel, the very short story Your Sterling Service, that shows Kitt having recently moved to the flat Mae owns). Forever In Your Service, book 2, came out in March, and according to the author’s website, the final book will be out next year.
So here comes my first quibble about this book: I felt it ended a tad abruptly, even considering that it is part of a trilogy, and on Happy For Now territory, which I have trouble with sometimes. I longed to see Mae and Kitt working out their way forward a bit more.
In addition, the violence and the fighting described were hard on me. It was also a bit confusing to keep a relatively large cast of characters in my head and to process the plot twist toward the end, which is, obviously, entirely my fault.
In my defense, the book was too good to read slowly, and I didn’t go back to try to figure out who this or that was because I was definitely hooked and desperately wanted to keep going. (I felt that delicious good-book pull between wanting to “save” it and wanting to read it as fast as possible.)
I suspect readers who are more into thrillers, mystery, and plot-driven stories will get an even greater enjoyment from this book, and perhaps give it a higher grade. And I am looking forward to reading more about Mae and Kitt, even as I tend to pick up books that are more character driven.
At Your Service is a very well written, funny, fast-paced read, and one that offers the rare opportunity to dwell among mature characters, emotionally and otherwise. For all that and for best use of a toilet brush in a romance novel, this book gets a B plus from me.
This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well.
Thanks!
I picked this up when someone here mentioned it in a comments section (sorry, I don’t remember who now). First off, kudos to Antonelli for the interesting setup and characters. But I gave it a B/B-, for some of the reasons you noted and more.
Once they both left London (I hope that’s not a spoiler) there was so much confusing running around and violence that it kind of lost me. So many characters and moving parts that I didn’t think were all that necessary to the outcome. Which also didn’t entirely gel for me. In my notes, I indicated that I didn’t like all the changes that Mae went thru over the course of the book–I liked cool, competent Mae better than bloodthirsty mess Mae.
I did like the book well enough to pick up the other two works, but a quick look at the next in the series convinced me to wait a bit before starting it. I think I just need a break first.
“Best use of a toilet brush in a romance novel.” If that doesn’t make you want to read this book, you haven’t cleaned the bathroom as often as I have!
I also liked this book right up to the twist. I just couldn’t get over it, and I really couldn’t see how Mae would, it made zero sense to me.
I really wanted to like this, but gave it up halfway through. The heroine does something really stupid early on which I had trouble believing she’d do. I never bought into the hero having feelings for her. Even the toilet brush scene failed to amuse me. It’s not my type of humor, I guess.
I think the biggest part of my problem was that I went into the story blind, only knowing that it had an older hero and heroine. I spent several chapters slowly realizing that it was basically Bond/Moneypenny fanfic, which is not something I’m at all interested in.
Im with vivi12, given the twist, I found it implausible that Mae would get beyond it. I read it on the tails of Any Old Diamonds, which has a much better done twist and resolution and the comparison just made me much more angry for Mae. She deserves better both in past and present.
Yeah, ditto on not liking the twist at the end. The twist in and of itself merits the deduction of a full point.
Like Vivi12, I enjoyed the book up until the twist. The premise is fun, and the banter is breezy. It’s a fun action/adventure story with no deep emotional exploration. I agree that a lot of the investigative elements and adventure sideplots can probably be streamlined or excised entirely, since they do not contribute any new information relevant to the plot or to any new character development. Nonetheless, it’s still enjoyable. Then Antonelli did the reveal at the end to resolve the mystery, and … IDK … not sure if any of it made sense. Maybe I was also reading too fast and missed an important detail or two? But I pride myself on being able to follow convoluted plots told out of chronological order from multiple POVs with large casts of characters with multiple names, titles, and nicknames without a spreadsheet. This book definitely does not rise to that level, and yet that twist left me feeling unsatisfied and scratching my head like, “eh????” The “main” villain was totally a rando character. Again, I may need to re-read to see if it makes more sense a second time around, but…
The best twist endings should be unexpected but still track with previously divulged information, so after the gut puch, the reader will go, “OHHH. Yeah, that makes sense.” Predictable endings are fine too if they are the logical conclusion to what was telegraphed before. Shock endings that aren’t properly telegraphed are cheap. But this one was just kind of “huh?? … weird.”
I sound like I’m bashing this book, but honestly, it’s fine. It’s totally readable. Just not sure if I’m motivated enough to read the sequel.
People keep mentioning a twist but I’m not remembering what it was. We find out what his real job is? (We knew that). Her husband wasn’t all he was cracked up to be? (Oh come on you had to guess as much). I’ll have to look at my copy.
Personally I loved it, but I’m a tad bloodthirsty.
@EJ, not those two that you mention (indeed known relatively early on) but that Kitt knew more about the case than he let up and kept Mae in the dark about it. Hard to explain further without getting into spoiler territory.
@Claudia
Ohh, ok that sounds familiar. It did bother me that he let his cohorts treat her like crap.
Revealing the twist is a spoiler, so I’m reluctant to do it, but it sure didn’t bother me. I thought it was pretty cinematic as the heroine’s threatened demise seems all but assured. As a confirmed suspense lightweight, the only thing keeping me going was the genre-guarantee that things will turn right in the end.
One of the great features of At Your Service was the role Mt. Etna played. The volcano has many moods in the story, sometimes in harmony and sometimes at counterpoint. You might be able to drive for miles enjoying the Sicilian countryside, or you might have to hunker down because the island is raining rock just prior to total annihilation.
The other was my delight in the cracking open of the James Bond stereotype as Major Kitt discovers one truth after another about himself. He is not immediately thrilled by these revelations, or by the difficulty he faces in convincing his Mae that they are real. Whether you’re a Bond film fan or not, seeing a guy who thought he was shallow bloom into a romantic is great fun.
Ok, trying to do this w/out spoilers. For my part, my comment refers partially to what I think Claudia is referring to in her comment and partially to the revelation at the end of who is actually orchestrating the malfeasance and why. The explanation at the end of the who, hows, and whys of the evildoers was underwhelming and slightly implausible to me. Like … I think it would have made more sense (and been more simple and elegant) for the bad guys to achieve their aims through a lawsuit instead of what they actually tried in the book.
I wanted to like this book, and indeed read all of it, but it keep feeling silly rather than satiric and there was an excess of mindless violence. This is multiplied in the next book making it a dnf. Her strange mix of proper English butler with the lower class Irish roots also began to grate. I felt if she said “fecin” one more time, i would scream. All in all I was quite disappointed. Perhaps someone with a taste for Bond fanfic, violence and spy novels might find it amusing, but not my thing at all.