Neonjade

The story Tracy Grant tells with Daughter of the Game has nice depth and wonderful potential. The mysteries to be solved revolve around happenings during Napoleon’s Peninsular War, where a diplomat husband and his wife met. The solving grounds are 1819 England.

Genre: Historical Thriller

My Rating: 5.5 out of 10

Following an apparent kidnapping, the wife must make confessions that might cost her most of what she holds dear in life to save something she holds dearer, her son. Kidnapping, espionage, true love, plot and counter plot all play merrily along as she and her betrayed husband desperately put the son’s safety and recovery above the distracting turmoil of a multitude of relationships being revealed to not be as they appeared. Overall, I liked the book and I’m glad I read it. I do have a couple of problems with it, though.

One is fairly forgivable. One of the plot twists is a bit much; an out of the blue punch that seemed more for shock factor than any real addition to the story. It felt contrived and distracting.

The other will keep me from searching out another of the author’s works purposefully. To me, the dialogue seemed soap opera driven. There were a handful of main characters that engaged in long, drawn out, explicit explanations of attitude, intention and result before and after every piece of action in the story. I had no problem at all setting this book down after 15 or 20 minutes of reading each evening. That’s a fairly criminal reaction to a suspense novel.

The story still wins out for a better than average read, though. I’m sure many appreciate that style of dialogue more than I, and to those folks, I heartily recommend Daughter of the Game. To the rest of you, you could do worse for a beside reader. Then again, you could probably do better, too.

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