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A Heartless Design (Secrets Of The Zodiac) (2013)

by Elizabeth Cole(Favorite Author)

4.01 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0615892574 (ISBN13: 9780615892573)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

SkySpark Books

series

Secrets of the Zodiac

review 1: This may be a good story. I don't know, because I didn't make it past the first few pages. The cover is pretty and vaguely Regency despite the bad/21st century hair on the model (not the author's fault), so I was guessing this was a historical romance. After a few paragraphs I was confused and thought maybe this was supposed to be alt history or Steampunk, and had to look up the blurb online. Nope. It's listed as a "Regency romance". What with there being a steel (sic) ship with a mechanical drive system powering a screw, and all of it designed by a woman in the first decade of the 19th century, I would not consider it historical. Iron (not steel) cladding wasn't used for another fifty years, not to mention steam propulsion. Hopefully Cole makes a big deal of the designer ... morebeing female, because that would have been huge back then, too. I'm not saying there weren't women designing things in the early 19th century (Ada Lovelace!), but it was not commonplace and they would have had huge social and commercial obstacles to surmount. Anyway, I couldn't continue with that much askew right out of the gate.I can't give it a serious rating of any kind since I didn't read it.
review 2: This book was a freebie on Amazon, and as I write this review (1/6/) it's still listed as free, so go grab it and then continue reading.Got it? Okay. This book caught my eye because 1. free (duh) 2. first of a series and 3. historical fiction (a favorite of mine). Right out of the gate I was a little disappointed, I was hoping for something with the same ring of authenticity as my beloved Victoria Holt novels. That said, about a quarter of the way into the book I was really beginning to enjoy the two main characters, Claudia Bering and Sebastian Thorne. Claudia is 28 and considers herself a spinster already because she has a secret passion: engineering. Specifically, building ships. She's brilliant and Cole writes her well. We learn that because she was an only child, her engineer father taught Claudia all the tricks of his trade, and she often helped him with designs as an adult until his death. After his death Claudia created a fictional man to continue to create designs under so that she could still participate in the exclusively male dominated engineering field. None were the wiser until dangerous plans she has created with her father go missing. This brings her path to Sebastian, who is a spy for a secret organization called the Zodiac. At first Sebastian is both completely taken and completely suspicious of Claudia, but as they work together to figure out who wants the dangerous plans they realize the future they envisioned for themselves might be significantly different. less

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