The continuing character development and personal relationships arc in this installment of the series gets a solid A. The mystery gets a tepid C.

I'll start with what I liked first. I love Sebastian and Hero together. He has always been the elegant, dangerous, larger than life protagonist who dominates the attention so well in this series and that hasn't changed. I am firmly on Sebastian's side no matter what -- I root for him, I want him to bitch-slap his stupid sister, and I so much want him and his (non)father Herndon to kiss and make up because I think despite it all, they have come to kinda love one another.

Hero, of course, didn't appear in the series until a bit later, but even when she did, I knew she'd be a good foil/match for Sebastian. She's cool, confident and just as dangerous -- albeit in a much chillier way-- as Sebastian is.

So the fact that these two are married, and negotiating the delicate balance between their strong personalities and their new, somewhat awkward union is a great road that this book travels. They like each other, they enjoy having sex with each other, but they are still very independent people.

During the course of the book, they each investigate the murder of Gabrielle Tennyson separately. Sebastian does so because it is now his avocation, but Hero does because Gabrielle was her friend. And Hero suspects her father is somehow involved. The reader watches the parallel investigations unfold and witnesses as both Sebastian and Hero discover key pieces of information that they don't share with each other until much later in the book because they are not used to this 'other person' in their life and they are both still struggling with trust issues.

But the book ends nicely on their personal front because they do come to an understanding that they are beginning to enjoy a regard for each other and they want to make their marriage work.

Another great forward momentum piece of personal revelation is that Sebastian gets yet another piece in the puzzle of his mother's disappearance and the possible identity of his biological father. He meets a person who might hold a clue. It remains to be seen if this person is a friend or foe, but it is a fascinating new character who despite myself I find as intriguing as Sebastian himself.

If there is one main character whose personal arc I am still unsatisfied with it would be Jarvis, Hero's super powerful Machiavellian father. Right now, I find his omnipotence makes for a flat character. We've seen at least a small glimpse of every other character's vulnerability. I want to see his. It could be Hero, I suppose. But the way his character is written I can't be to sure of that. It seems to me that he is prepared for Hero to be collateral damage if the time comes that he really has to destroy Sebastian.

On the plot side of things, I didn't find the mystery as satisfying. The victim is a friend of Hero's who is an ardent antiquarian blue-stocking and is killed on what is purported to be the modern day site of the mythical Camelot. I think much of my frustration with the mystery is that 90% of it is all Macguffin. Sebastian and Hero do an awful lot of investigation and meet a lot of potential murderers and yet the final solution of the mystery has pretty much nothing to do with what all the stuff they actually investigated. I wish the mystery was more clever than it was.

But as I said, the characters, more than the mystery plot, were the strength in this outing.

I think readers of this series will really enjoy this one.