Weak 3, mainly in honor of the series as a whole then this one book (which would have probably gotten a 2 by itself).

This was a hard one for me to rate. Its better then a lot of historic mysteries, but I was a little bored throughout it. There was not a lot of action, it was mostly just Sebastian going around talking to people, then Jarvis comes to warn him off of investigating, then someone tries to kill him and he kills them instead, then Hero introduces him to one of the street people she interviews, then he figures out who the killer is. All of which we have seen before in other books in the series. We don't see a lot of Hero, who is awesome. One pro is that the apparently ubiquitous scene where he has to talk to Kat for no apparent reason was very short. She is just so useless and I roll my eyes every time he makes up a reason to go talk to her.

I was really wanting for Hero to finally have a confrontation with her father about her mothers death and him clearly sleeping with the cousin. I want to see Sebastian look for his real father. I want to see more of his and Hero's relationship. So, basically I was just a little annoyed at the lack of progress. I say this having loved Sebastian for so many books, but this series has been going on a long while, maybe its time to let it die if the mysteries are going to be so monotonous.