Full Metal Wheelbarrow

Heart's Blood by Gail Dayton. 418 pages.

I wavered a lot over buying this one, because it sounded as much Mills and Boon romance as Victorian urban fantasy, and while I rather like the latter, the former isn't really my thing.  But on the whole, I think the 80p I paid for it was reasonable value for money.

The worldbuilding and magic rules that Dayton establishes are pretty good, the plot is reasonably interesting - head of one of four magical guilds wakes up near the body of a man killed by magic and has to solve the crime - and the characters had enough personality to be more than cardboard cut-outs.

The romance aspects were a bit cliched and cloying, but I could cope with that in light of the rest of it. The only thing that really annoyed me was that there was no  explanation that I saw for the way that the protagonist "sleepwalked" to the site of the murder. Or perhaps I just missed that.

Black Sheep by Georgette Heyer

I wanted something light and fluffy after the grimness of Small Island, so I turned to one of the Heyers in my "To Read" pile.  I'm not a big romance reader as a rule, but Heyer is one of the exceptions. I love her books. Not intellectually stretching perhaps, but they generally do exactly what it says on the tin :-)

This one is perhaps not one her best - I found the male protagonist a bit too devil-may-care for my taste, but it's still a fun fast read, with all the usual stuff - fortune hunters, gullible young ladies, a sensible heroine and gossipy old ladies. And naturally, a happy ending :-)