Grim Shadows

April 21, 2014
Lowe Magnusson is a brazen liar, and his scheming makes Bennett’s second Roaring Twenties romance much less satisfying than its predecessor, Bitter Spirits. Lowe, a kind of amoral Indiana Jones, cares about money and sex, in that order, and seeks both without inhibition. While on the lam, he encounters a funereally dressed woman on a train platform; he arranged the meeting for the purpose of bilking her and promptly forgot, but she refuses to miss her chance to recover a rare artifact in his possession. Archaeologist Hadley Bacall is as unpleasantly cold as Lowe is aggressively oversexed; when Lowe says “What a little snob you are,” the reader can only agree. Hadley is also every bit as self-centered in pursuing her career, albeit more constrained by social mores. There’s not a lot of potential joy in this setup. Glimpses of characters from the previous book coax a little warmth into the situation, but it never truly blazes into romance. Agent: Laura Bradford, Bradford Literary Agency.