While I thought the idea of the “Bombshell” imprint was a bad idea on the part of Harlequin/Silhouette, I thought the idea of the Bombshell novels were great. This is not a contradiction. I suspected that the entire line – as presented in concept to me – was not sustainable. Sort of like a steady diet of Cheesy Poofs.
You need variety in your reading diet.
So yeah, more strong, kick-ass heroines, but maybe not so much on the “create an entire line around an idea” approach. Bombshell should have been a sub-imprint or whatever they’re called. I liked most of the Bombshells I read, but, as we are about to discover, there were some misses in the bunch.
I pulled out Jenna Mills’ Veiled Legacy because she’s an author I like, I was going to Hawaii, and after carefully packing for every eventuality, including a freak snowstorm, I discovered that I didn’t have a book for the plane. Quelle horreur! So I grabbed a novel from the never-diminishing stack of books to be read.
Let me say this upfront: I much preferred the in-flight magazine to this novel. There was also some great trivia that repeated every five questions or so.
This book is part of “The Madonna Key” series, which, as is my lifelong curse, I picked up mid-stream. I believe the sign of a good installment in any series is when the reader is instantly clear on the intricacies of the previous books while dropped into a new story of exciting proportions. The Madonna Key, which has the misfortune of hewing a little too close to the various conspiracies laid out in The DaVinci Code, posits that important, world-saving knowledge was hidden away by a strong cabal of women. Now, as the planet teeters on the edge of disaster, the spiritual/physical/metaphysical descendents of these early priestesses are brought together to find and decipher the secrets of the past and save the world.
It’s a great idea. And, as I noted, just another variation on the same conspiracy theories that propelled Dan Brown to the bestseller list. So yeah, I was looking for something new and exciting. In order to buy into this series, I needed to believe that I was getting something new and different. I got vagueness and confusion and not much in the way of great reading.
Do I sound cranky? Good. That’s exactly the mood I’m going for.
The novel begins when Nadia Bishop, a former MI-6 agent, sees an obituary of a woman who looks exactly like her. The woman was, coincidentally, murdered in the same town where Nadia had a torrid affair (leading to a secret baby!). As fate would have it, Nadia’s lover was a bad guy and his family was worse. She left town, pronto. Now, with her dead doppelganger out there, Nadia has no choice to return to the scene of her passion and investigate this mystery.
I mean, who wouldn’t? What else can you do when you encounter the improbability of a magazine obituary for a death in another country? If it’s not a planted clue, it’s a sign. I’m not going to suggest that this novel is a long series of coincidental encounters and clues, but that’s only because I know you can draw your own conclusions from thinly veiled sarcasm.
It is my opinion that the success or failure of so-called kick-ass heroines lies in their believability. If I were to go mano a mano with one these chicks, I need to know I’m going to lose. Maybe it’s the caffeine talking, but I could take Nadia. She’s some sort of former spy who apparently carried a gun (which she always calls her “9 mm”, leading me to suspect she had other favorite guns in varying metric measurements). Yet, as evidenced by the fact that stealth wasn’t her forte (unless there’s a new meaning of stealth that includes “always getting busted”), she wasn’t the sharpest spy on the block. Nor did she seem particularly adept at the hand-to-hand stuff.
I could take her. I mean, if I hadn’t taken a vow of non-violence against fictional characters.
Nadia quickly discovers that the dead woman is her long-lost sister. Said sister had worked diligently to uncover the secrets of the past, secrets that form the core of this series. I’m not going to read the other books in the series (see later in the review), so go ahead enlighten me: did this sister kick some serious intellectual butt in the other books? For my money, the dead sister was the interesting sister.
Scarlet (dead sister) was murdered because her discoveries and analysis put her on the path of the evil Adriano family. While alive, she figured it all out. Then she died, taking her brains and savvy with her. Sigh. Nadia is naturally compelled to continue her sister’s work – even though it is clearly dangerous. Did I mention that Nadia had a secret baby? I always wonder about heroines who endanger their lives – even heroines who are apparently well-trained in mortal combat – while their cute little kids wait at home.
I digress. Nadia’s work repeatedly places her in the path of Joshua Adriano, the man she knew as Antonio back when she was pretending to be a woman named Zoe. While the attraction remains strong, Nadia knows that she cannot allow herself to act on her hormones. Nor can she tell Joshua about his child. That would be bad. Sure, keeping the secret is unethical, but that’s okay because she knows that he’s evil, deep down inside.
I would like to note that Joshua’s evil character is largely a figment of Nadia’s imagination. This story does not reveal a particularly menacing man. If I can be so bold, he’s a fairly dull character. And Nadia comes off a bit twitish as she repeatedly runs away from the man. It’s like reading a game of chase. Presumably, the entire series exposes the dangers of the Adriano family. Mills simply doesn’t up the urgency or menace in this installment.
All of this means that I’m sure Joshua is a fine man and will make a great continuing character, but, boy, I have no clue what he’s about. Worse, I suspect neither does Nadia.
Nadia hopscotches between Saint-Tropez, Ireland, France, and even Pompeii, seeking out Scarlet’s posse, finding answers to a mystical mosaic of The Lady, the symbol of the Marians, who, for the purposes of shorthand, were the female equivalent of the Knights Templar (yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t have time to get into the full story). For those who care about these things, Ireland is misty and dreamy, Saint-Tropez is seedy and dangerous, France is filled with guns and secret caves.
Nadia, for those who care, is the type of woman who has a private plane at her disposal (adoption by rich, connected parents has its benefits). Wherever the she needs to be, the magic plane takes her. I think I’ve talked about the urgency thing when it comes to ratcheting up tension. A great way to do this is to limit a character’s mobility. I mean, drain the plane’s fuel tank or something. Don’t let your on-the-edge-of-doom character fall victim to on-demand transportation.
What bothered me most about this story was the lack of specificity. Nadia’s career with the MI-6 – what, exactly, did she do? The Adriano’s evilness? Well, it seems that in a former book they unleashed some sort of deadly virus, but in this novel, there’s lots of chase, lots of innuendo, but nothing to make me feel like I should look over my shoulder when I walk outside.
Maybe this is a limitation of the first-person point-of-view, especially in a continuing series written by different authors. Nadia can only tell me what she knows – and since she only knows hearsay and evidence gleaned from reports, she is not the right character to build Adriano-related tension. Everyone was happy to tell me about the nefarious Adrianos, nobody really showed me. The family in this book is bad, but not end-of-the-world bad.
The Marians came off as a fairly generic goddess cult. I don’t know if this series was conceived before or after The DaVinci Code, but I do know that, love it or hate it, it lead to a lot of interest in historical females of the Biblical bent. You know, like women named Mary. So the name of this group is evocative of that novel. The hidden knowledge passed through the ages is also evocative that novel (which in all fairness was a fictionalized version of various “Mary”-based conspiracy theories).
I need more than a mysterious Lady who could save the world if a mosaic can be recreated. I need a specific, action-oriented, tangible link between the past and present. The barely-there paranormal element – Nadia and Scarlet are connected through flashbacks/visions/dreams/something to ancestors long gone – didn’t achieve that goal. I do like parallel storylines, but this one didn’t really add much to my reading experience. It lacked the necessary emotional connection that I needed.
If not that, then I need the thing that Dan Brown did right: he moved the story so fast that logic, plausibility, and even story development were irrelevant. Talk about Cheesy Poofs…
I suppose I can’t talk about this book without talking about the chick thing. In creating the Marians, the authors of this series naturally wrote a set of books with a strong core of women, and they then took the easy way with these women. They’re going to be best buds without a trace of conflict. Hate that. Just hate that. I am growing increasingly tired of the whole sister/solidarity thing.
Relationships between women come in very few flavors in romance novels these days. There is the whole heroine/evil other woman thing. You know how that rolls. Then there’s the group of friends who will see each other through thick and thin without a single negative comment. The women in these novels band together like a solid wall of saccharine. Instead of one character who is too good to be true, we are treated to a gang.
All of this lovely solidarity has the unfortunate side effect of defusing tension in the novel. Since Joshua as a bad guy is almost laughable, the other major characters in the novel need to carry the weight of conflict. Yet there they are, cavorting like they are of one mind. Novel by novel, new women will be collected and added to the cast of characters. They will be BFFs. It’s dull.
Mills tries to salvage the whole sisterhood sweetness by creating tension between Nadia and her long-time nanny/caretaker Olga, but instead of creating a compelling battle between the two characters, it’s all hand-wringing worry and lack of confrontation…right up to the happy ending.
Put another way, it’s all tell, no show. The edges of this story are very neat, honed to soft roundness. When the fate of the world is at stake, the reader needs to feel like each page, each scene, each chapter, each book ups the ante. There should be, at a bare minimum, breathless anticipation of the next book because you have to know that humanity, the planet, the universe, whatever will survive.
It is a bad thing when the reader finishes the book with a sigh of relief…that the ordeal is over. Despite the fact that I liked the concept of the series as presented, Jenna Mills worked very hard to make sure that I didn’t look for other books in this series.
You can find Jenna Mills here (okay, not really, no website). You can buy Veiled Legacy here or here. You can agree or disagree in the comments section below.
