The Lady Thief of Belgravia - Allison Grey - ★.½

AUTHOR: Allison Grey

GENRE: Historical Steamy Romance.

RATING: 1.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: Doesn't deliver what the title and the blurb promise. Focuses more on the 'stirrings in the stomach' than on the workings of the mind. Very disappointed because I hope for far better from the premise.

Story Synopsis:

1879. Della is a twenty-four year old pickpocket, and quite good at her job in the notorious Seven Dials area of London. Imagine her surprise when the Earl of Bradford hires her for a special task: she needs to steal back some very important documents from the evil Duke of Salisbury. Della doesn't work for anyone, but at the high reward he offers, she can't refuse. Now with the help of the Earl, whose name is Cole, Della needs to train herself to become a high-society lady so that she can get her work done quickly and earn enough to get out of Seven Dials.

The story comes to us through the limited third person perspective of Della and Cole.

Bookish Yays:

🍓 A pretty cover and an attention-grabbing title.

🍓 A narrative voice for both Cole and Della – a rare occurrence in this genre for the male lead to get his thoughts on paper. (Never mind that his thoughts were almost the same as Della’s!)

🍓 Never heard of a place called Seven Dials in historical London, so I learned something new. (I also learned that one can wiggle one’s backside even in a bustle gown. Who knew! What will I do with this knowledge? No idea!)

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🍍 The actual “heist”, if I can call it that, is decently executed. (This was the only thing that saved the book from getting a one star rating.) But this comes too late in the story. Moreover, every heist story has to have something going majorly wrong. This one was too smooth to be fun.

🍍 A couple of the secondary characters from Seven Dials – I’d have loved to know them better.

Bookish Nays:

🌶 The character development is almost non-existent. Della and Cole meet within the first few pages of the book, so we get their backstory only in bits and pieces through their conversations. The Duke was so idiotic that I failed to understand how Britain’s best spies also had failed to recover the stolen property from that nincompoop. The overall effect is very flat.

🌶 All the steamy stuff - aargh! I expected ‘My Fair Lady’ combined with a daring heist plan. What I didn't realise was that the focus of the writing would be more on the intense physical attraction that Della and Cole feel for each other. Every single scene with the two of them contains at least one instance of stirrings or feelings or some other kind of physical palpitations, no matter whether they were alone or with anyone else, whether they were talking or quiet, whether they were dancing or horse-riding… heck, even during the heist, their libido isn’t in control. It was over the top and cringeworthy. I am no prude, but there has to be a way in which lascivious scenes/thoughts are incorporated into the plot smoothly. You can’t shove them into every single scene!

🌶 Anachronisms in the writing, especially but not only in the conversations. Imagine someone saying “plant a bomb” in 1879 – Sheesh! Moreover, Cole promises Della 10000 pounds if she completes her assignment. Really? In ‘Pride & Prejudice’, written just seven decades before this story is set, Darcy’s annual income of 10000 pounds makes him the richest man around for miles. Was inflation so much that by 1879, earls had 10000 pounds – worth almost 15 million pounds today – to spare as reward money, no matter how valuable the item? Also, the use of the F word (even by the Earl, not just by Della) – a nope for the periodic setting.

🌶 Too many illogical occurrences! (I know romance is not to be read with logic, but this book isn't a plain romance, so heck yeah, I'm using my logic!) Cole hires Della as a last resort and takes her to his mansion on the very day they meet, saying that “time is of the essence” as the job needs to be completed urgently. And then he plans to invest a few weeks in training her to become a proper lady, with horse riding, lessons, piano lessons, social behaviour training, language polishing, and what not! Then the plan is for her to meet the Duke and woo him into trusting her enough so that she can carry out the job. I fail to see how any of this can be called “urgent.”

🌶 Della’s makeover itself is fraught with goofs. She isn’t taught art, but is trained to play the piano, apparently because the piano can be learned well enough within a few weeks to impress the high society snobs. Seriously? The piano is easier to master than painting? Has any musical novice attempted playing dual-clef classical sheet music within that tiny time frame? Moreover, Della’s accent keeps changing even before her training. She pronounces or skips the final ‘-ing’ as per her convenience, no consistency at all. It was also very convenient that Della had access to the “classics” and loved books that most of us today would yawn at. (Books by Homer, Plato and their ilk.) Not once did Della struggle to adapt to the drastic change in her life, which made the whole thing even more unreal.

🌶 The ‘relationship” – An Earl lusting after a beautiful thief? Definitely possible. An Earl pursuing a serious relationship without a single thought about society or scandal and not a tinge of regret or doubt, not even once dwelling on the what-ifs? Unlikely. And not a single person throwing looks of derision at their union? Impossible. Nothing about their relationship felt rational.

I never pick up steamy romances, and this book isn’t indicated as such anywhere. (I don’t think “sparkling romance”, as used in the blurb, indicates “steamy” or “spicy”.) To any reader who enjoys raunchy love stories, this book might work better. But I just kept rolling my eyes and almost fractured them in the process.

Then again, the “steam” isn’t the only reason I am steaming right now. There was so much potential in the base premise, but the execution needs a whole lot of developmental editing to make sense. Della was a strong character, so it is sad that her character wasn’t allowed to shine on her own merits.

Apologies to the team behind the book, but It’s a no from me. I hate being so harsh on an ARC, especially when it is a debut work, but I struggled with this read all the way, and found barely anything to justify my efforts. This might work better for regency romance lovers looking for a smutty romance story and not for a historical heist novel. Maybe its marketing ought to be changed as the current blurb doesn't give a true idea of the content.

My thanks to Storm Publishing and NetGalley for the DRC of “The Lady Thief of Belgravia”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.