Author: Gail Carriger
Series: Parasol Protectorate (#3)
Publisher: Orbit
How Received: bought
Quitting her husband's house and moving back in with her horrible family, Lady Maccon becomes the scandal of the London season.
Queen Victoria dismisses her from the Shadow Council, and the only person who can explain anything, Lord Akeldama, unexpectedly leaves town. To top it all off, Alexia is attacked by homicidal mechanical ladybugs, indicating, as only ladybugs can, the fact that all of London's vampires are now very much interested in seeing Alexia quite thoroughly dead.
While Lord Maccon elects to get progressively more inebriated and Professor Lyall desperately tries to hold the Woolsey werewolf pack together, Alexia flees England for Italy in search of the mysterious Templars. Only they know enough about the preternatural to explain her increasingly inconvenient condition, but they may be worse than the vampires -- and they're armed with pesto.
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The second two books in the Parasol Protectorate series have yet to live up to the standard set in Soulless. However, they are armed with Gail's fantastic writing style - full of wit, charm, and the ability to make me fangirl.
Did I think the plot improved over Changeless? Oh yes. I wasn't as sure of what was going to come next, and the new characters (Templars, anybody?) introduced were interesting, though not particularly entertaining. I will be happiest if the upcoming Heartless is centered in London, without a roving Alexia.
However, I do love Alexia. You can put her in any situation and it immediately becomes entertaining. And Lord Maccon? Oh, I do adore him. He has his flaws - what man and or wolf doesn't!? - and watching him drunk was absolutely hysterical. Put Maccon and Alexia in the same scene and I can't help but love what I read. I did think Alexia should have stayed angrier at Maccon in the end.
But if Gail rewrote the phone book, I'd read it. I just absolutely adore her writing style, and her quotability factor is through the roof - just ask my family; I kept giggling and reading parts of the book to them as I went through.
Final Comments: Read this series. It's awesome. And Gail is probably one of my favorite writers of all time.