Society’s most exclusive invitation…
Welcome to the Phoenix Club, where London’s most audacious, disreputable, and intriguing ladies and gentlemen find scandal, redemption, and second chances.
Lord Lucien Westbrook is Society’s most charming and helpful gentleman. Overlooked and discredited by his father, Lucien seeks to support others any way that he can—no one deserves to feel unloved. So when he has the chance to assist his best friend’s sister in her scientific endeavors, who is he to refuse? Except her experiments involve kissing and touching and understanding how humans mate…
When her brother carried on a secret affair with Lucien’s sister, Lucien had been furious and now here is he committing the very same sin.
Too bad he can’t help himself.
Review:
The series finale!
I feel like we’ve been waiting forever for Lucien’s book–and was beyond excited to see that he’d be guilty of the same crime his best friend was, the tried and true falling for your best friend’s little sister. I mean, he had it coming, right? 😉
That said, I went back and forth on this one–I don’t know when it’s ever taken me this long to finish a book by Darcy Burke!–because it wasn’t *quite* all that I was hoping for in the end.
For all that I’ve been dying for Lucien’s book, Kat’s a difficult heroine to sympathize with 100% of the time. It appears she’s somewhere on the autism spectrum, and though I did appreciate that she was self aware about some things (the ways she had come up with to self soothe, for example) and experienced some self growth (being able to–eventually, with effort–recognize that other people’s feelings about things she didn’t care about were valid), I’m just not totally convinced that she’s the right heroine for Lucien (TBH it kinda felt like their “insatiability” was their main attraction, which didn’t feel like enough). I loved that the people who really cared about her were so supportive of her needs, but there were times that she just seemed too far OTT to be believed and it was sometimes difficult to really feel for her, even in her POV portions of the book.
The mystery of who was pulling the strings behind the scenes at the Phoenix Club is finally resolved, and we learn whether or not Lucien will be able to maintain control of it. The resolution here is satisfying, though the path to get there was slightly muddled at times and I almost wished I’d read the previous books more recently than I did, because I kept forgetting who was who in the mystery/espionage parts of the book.
The best parts of the book were when we caught up with everyone else from the series; that, and the fact that the loose threads from previous stories were finally tied up nicely. Though this technically could be read as a standalone, since most of its strengths are in how it relates to previous books I wouldn’t recommend that a newbie start here.
Rating: 4 stars / B+
I voluntarily reviewed an Advance Reader Copy of this book.