A Perilous Undertaking

by Deanna Raybourn

January 10, 2017 · Berkley

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Genre: Historical: European, Mystery/Thriller

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A Perilous Undertaking is book 2 in the Veronica Speedwell series. I advise that you start with book one, A Curious Beginning, to get a better sense of the world, and the characters. I read the two books one after the other, so my impressions are influenced by their proximity in my brain, but looking solely at book two and skipping book one leaves a wealth of motivation and development behind, and readers would miss out on the full scope of the world building.

Alas, this isn’t a start-anywhere-you-like series, but this is only the second book. And the series is a sizable amount of fun if you like historical mysteries, fearless and intelligent heroines who take negative-zero crap from anyone, characters who embrace sarcasm, adventure and nefarious plotting, and taciturn but brilliant heroes with simmering sexual tension.

None of you fit that audience, I know. Certainly not.

Because this is ostensibly a review of the second book, I’ll focus more on that story and the flaws I noticed, but I also want to mention a few excellent things about the characters and the world in which they reside for this series. Veronica Speedwell is a iconoclast in her society – inspired, as I learned in this podcast interview, by real women in history. She’s  something of an ex-pat in her own country: a world traveling lepidopterist (butterfly hunter) who has survived massive and deadly natural disasters abroad AND the social castigation of her small town neighbors. The first book begins at her aunt’s funeral, where she is saying farewell to her last mortal tie to England and preparing to leave the country, probably for good. Things don’t work out as she planned, and she ends up in the hot, smelly, and filthy warehouse dwelling of a taxidermist and scientist named Stoker who is really grumpy, and of course physically attractive. She has no problem taking lovers – she’s had several and has no shame whatsoever about her sexual experience, which is considerable, but due to the social censure and the tendency for men to talk too much, she has a strict rule to only indulge in affairs outside of England. So, for her, Stoker is off-limits no matter how much he… yeah, I’ll let that joke go.

The first book unravels a mystery that centers on Veronica’s past and a mysterious gentleman who came to meet her after her aunt’s funeral. I don’t want to say much more than that, but the results of that book influence the second – hence my advice to read both. The second begins as Veronica is invited to the exclusive Curiosity Club as a guest of a member, only to be asked by a woman she’s never met to prove a man sentenced to hang in one week didn’t commit the murder of which he’s accused.

Here’s what you’ll enjoy if you do read both:

• Veronica is delightful as a narrator. The book is told in first person sarcastic, and as I said, Veronica is intelligent, curious, unflappable and unashamed of who she is. She enjoys a freedom outside of England that she doesn’t experience much inside it, and her world view has been expanded so much by her travels that the narrowness of English society is increasingly frustrating for her the longer she stays there. (The scene in the vicar’s cottage after the funeral in A Curious Beginning is particularly terrific.)
• Stoker is cranky and moody, and a little reminiscent of Raybourn’s prior hero in the Lady Julia Grey series. He’s also a brilliant naturalist, and appreciates Veronica’s intellect and experience in natural sciences.
• The two make an excellent team of amateur sleuths/irrepressible nosy smart people, especially because they each straddle class boundaries in unique and unexpected ways.
• Yes, slow burn – very very slow burn. The ignition of this particular burn seems very far off, but there are moments between them that mix with the mystery to increase the tension.

The mysteries, alas, were uneven. The first one, in A Curious Beginning, I found compelling partly because the mystery affected Veronica’s understanding of many things as I was learning about her myself, so it was both intricate and intimate, and the stakes were higher.

The mystery in A Perilous Undertaking, however, was not as strong, and I noticed more of the scaffolding holding up the story. There were repeated mentions of characters who couldn’t possibly be the culprit, and theories that were easily dismissed without enough reason for disregarding them – which was odd for a pair of people who could argue for pages about what genus or class a particular moth belongs in. While I cared about the victim of the first mystery, the victim of the second isn’t really introduced or developed, and I wasn’t as invested in the mystery to be solved, or in the person who was going to hang in a week if Veronica and Stoker didn’t prove he was innocent. The emotional stakes are lower in the second mystery, but the emotional stakes are higher for Veronica and Stoker themselves.

I read A Curious Beginning with an I-cannot-put-this-down enthusiasm and devoured it very quickly. I relished both the characters and the mystery. With A Perilous Undertaking, I was reading more for the unique world that I wanted to visit, and for the characters themselves. Smart individuals trying to make their way in a world that they don’t quite fit into, while at the same time satisfying their intellectual curiosity and refusing to apologize for who they are – hello, there, my catnip. There are also many small historical details that inform the plot, and the second book in particular explores intricacies and tiny elements of Victorian mourning culture in a way I found engrossing.

I kept returning to A Perilous Undertaking after any reading interruptions (SO bothersome) because I wanted to read more of Veronica and Stoker annoying each other, figuring out how to get into places they shouldn’t be able to enter, and arguing about everything, but not necessarily because of the mystery plot. In this book, the circumstances that bring them a mystery to solve aren’t as compelling as the forces keeping them in proximity. I was more than happy to keep reading to see what Veronica and Stoker did and said than I was interested in finding out who did what to whom and why. (If there are side stories where they travel together, or future books where they journey out of England and go exploring the world while bickering with each other, I’m entirely ready for those stories right now immediately right away please.) The Veronica Speedwell series is excellent and intelligent fun, and while the second isn’t quite as satisfying as the first, I heartily recommend them both.