Blameless

by Gail Carriger
New York: Orbit, 2010.

The third highly-anticipated book (for me, at least!) in the Alexia Tarabotti series begins with Lady Maccon once again living with her appalling family because her husband, Earl of Woolsey and werewolf Alpha, has kicked her out. Alexia is pregnant, you see, a state that scientists agree would be impossible as her husband is not exactly living, and she herself as a preternatural never expected what she has dubbed the infant-inconvenience. The vampires seem to know more about it than she does, however, because they want her dead.

While I enjoyed reading more adventures of Alexia, Lord Maccon, Professor Lyall, Ivy Tunstell (nee Hisselpenny), and the rest, I did not enjoy Blameless quite as much as the previous titles in the series. Perhaps this has more to do with my expectations than the story itself. I expected certain plot threads to take more time than they did to resolve, and was taken aback by how much time is spent figuring out why Alexia is pregnant and what that means for the supernatural community. Personally, since the fact that she is pregnant is a given, I was less interested in the how. I enjoyed the over-the-top humor as always, and was intrigued by the hints that Ivy is not quite as harebrained as we may have been led to believe. I will be looking forward to the publication of Heartless, the next book in the series, due out in July of next year.