Blameless

By: Gail Carriger / Narrated By: Emily Gray

Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins

Now THIS is how you craft an engaging series…!!!

Okay so: Here’s the thing about writing a series…

You have to add new twists and turns, brand spanking new situations, introduce awesome new characters, develop aaaallll characters and plots/subplots further—take ‘em to a new level—AND! ya have to tie up enough loose threads but leave enough room at the end to make the listener wish, NAY! Yearn Most Excruciatingly For… the next book in the series. You know, withOUT committing egregious crafting sins such as… oh I dunno… earning a Michael J. Sullivan Boooo! Award (Have things go along, tra lala lala, and then WHAM! Last five minutes, introduce the very first twist in the story and leave all on a cliffhanger. You see? Is that or is that not, inCREDibly cheesy and manipulative and lazy storytelling?!?).

Now with Book 2, Changeless, author Gail Carriger got perilously close to earning a resounding Boooo! what with an ultra-sudden development that was a total series game changer, and with extreeeme reactions causing great upheaval. What saved her, indeed what made her choices a fine example about how exACTly to write a close, was that so very many loose ends were tied up, and there was distinct forward motion with what was introduced, further character development, and just some mighty fine bang-up writing. And what did that leave?

A TOTAL Hankering For The Next One!!!

Here in Blameless, all opens with our intrepid and newly impregnated heroine Alexia suffering the slings and arrows of her obnoxious family’s condemnation. That her hubby Conall has unceremoniously chucked her out of her own house and home has made all the news, and now Alexia is having to live as The New Scandal of the Season. As the scandal (It’s being intimated that the undead Lord Maccon canNOT cause a pregnancy, thereby implying most fiercely that Lady Maccon has been stepping outside the marriage bed…) widens and becomes more obnoxious, Alexia is unceremoniously chucked out (Again with the Chucking Out!) of the family home. Also? Queen Victoria has turned her back on her, leaving Alexia without standing and her job.

She’s just persona non grata, all around England. This has her with precious few options—and a burning desire to figure out who can help her understand her situation—but to traipse off, leaving England and scandal and Conall behind. She’s off, with a small band of the best secondary characters EVER, to Italy to do some sleuthing.

So here’s where the story, the writing shines. Because Carriger carries a LOT of plots all one after the other. We see what’s truuuuly on Conall’s mind, and it’s simply FRAUGHT with despair, hopelessness, self-pity… and formaldehyde… As this is his near-constant state, we get to see Beta Werewolf, Professor Lyall, fastidiously stepping in to help keep the Pack together, to run a sleuthing bit on the side, to help solve a mystery (The sudden disappearance of Alexia’s best Vampire friend, Lord Akeldama and every. single. one of his boy-drones… esPECially the ever-loyal, ever Uber-kempt Biffy… what has happened to them all?!). And Lyall has to deal with shots taken to overthrow the Pack’s absent Alpha. Dueling with teeth, fangs, claws?

Yesss!

Add the introduction of mechanical ladybugs hellbent on KILLING Alexia, throw in plenty of Parasol usage with all its new-fangled and dastardly well-conceived weapons, and we have ourselves a nice little Steampunk-y Victorian Romance mash-up.

Then there are new characters thrown in, MAJOR twists added which can only be developed through the next books in the series, and action! action! action!

All this is, as always, voice-acted brilliantly by narrator Emily Gray. And this is the part where I can do nothing but shower her with well-earned kudos, but this time? Oh good gosh, I gotta add a couple o’ dings, one tiny, one befuddling. Tiny: When there’s a coming together of aaaallll the characters in a single action scene, Gray stumbles, just a wee bit, on which accent goes where. There are now French accents, German, Italian, to go with distinct voices for each of our beloved characters, so that made that particular sequence just the tiniest bit confusing. Second? And befuddling? I don’t know WHO chooses length of pauses, but there are some LOOOONG pauses in between the switching of one scene to another. Now, Audible has been messing with the app yet again, and I’ve been experiencing m’ phone burning up and then crashing, so throughout the entirety of this story, these paaaauses had me running over to see if m’ phone had just crashed again. To see if somehow Play was Paused or even just plain Off. So truly, is it the narrator who decides to definitively separate scenes through lengthy pauses, or is it the darned editor who did NOT pare down the length?

Minor? Wellllll, it didn’t happen in the first two books, so I’m hoping this was a One-Off. THAT aside? Brava yet again to Gray, for carrying off such a well-written story, characters who are multi-faceted and who are given clever dialogue… not to mention a super duper inebriated Lord Maccon bemoaning his fate after his blatant stupidity. HiLARious!!!

This time? Well, Carriger wraps things up with nary a hint of a Boooo! Award waiting in the wings. Instead, she’s relied on the twists and additions created throughout the story, all the new things and situations our beloved characters will have to be dealing with in the books to come.

And the end? A final sentence or two that just flat-out brought a grand smile to m’ face…!

On to Book 4!

Care to join me?

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