Summary from Goodreads: New York Times bestselling author Sarah MacLean returns with a blazingly sexy, unapologetically feminist new series, Hell’s Belles, beginning with a bold, bombshell of a heroine, able to dispose of a scoundrel—or seduce one—in a single night.
After years of living as London’s brightest scandal, Lady Sesily Talbot has embraced the reputation and the freedom that comes with the title. No one looks twice when she lures a gentleman into the dark gardens beyond a Mayfair ballroom…and no one realizes those trysts are not what they seem.
No one, that is, but Caleb Calhoun, who has spent years trying not to notice his best friend’s beautiful, brash, brilliant sister. If you ask him, he’s been a saint about it, considering the way she looks at him…and the way she talks to him…and the way she’d felt in his arms during their one ill-advised kiss. Except someone has to keep Sesily from tumbling into trouble during her dangerous late-night escapades, and maybe close proximity is exactly what Caleb needs to get this infuriating, outrageous woman out of his system. But now Caleb is the one in trouble, because he’s fast realizing that Sesily isn’t for forgetting…she’s forever. And forever isn’t something he can risk.
Ok, so I tried to start the galley for Bombshell several times and kept getting frustrated. I think I might have been mad at Caleb – not Sesily, never Sesily, because she’s awesome – and also 2021 was a raging garbage fire and I was mad about a lot of things (still am) and I had very bad pudding brain. However, I finally came up on the hold list for the audiobook, read by the awesome Mary Jane Wells who also reads Marrying Winterbourne and all sorts of other things by Lisa Kleypas, and I just TORE through it this time. So, who knows? Reading brains are weird.
Sesily is a bit like an old friend by now – we met her first in The Rogue Not Taken and the next two Scandal and Scoundrel books (where she barfed on Haven’s boots in The Day of the Duchess – he totally deserved it). It’s several years later and Sesily is part of an awesome, injustice-fighting secret Lady Gang headed up by the Duchess of Trevelyan, rescuing women from bad engagements, abusive husbands, and harassing employers. She’s best friends with the other members of the gang, a con-artist (Adelaide) and a chemist/bomb-maker (Imogen). She’s the “fun Auntie” to her many nieces and nephews. She’s a proper scandal and enjoys it…but the one man she absolutely wants beyond all reason has run all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to stay away from her. Caleb says it’s because she’s his business partner Sera’s sister, but something else must be up.
On the night she has to do some Gang business under cover of the Duchess’s ball, Caleb appears in London. He’s only there because Sera’s going to have another baby and he’ll need to oversee The Singing Sparrow for a while. But then straight back to Boston, do not pass GO, do not think about Sesily Talbot, and don’t even THINK about kissing her in a dark garden let alone actually do that…whoops.
And so begins a back and forth between Sesily and Caleb. Caleb realizes that Sesily is up to something dangerous, underscored by an attack by an unknown group of heavies on the pub Sesily and her friends attend which seems to be part of a larger, coordinated effort to scare off businesses owned by people other than cis, white men (the same group is at work attacking Grace’s establishment in Daring and the Duke). However, Sesily really won’t tell Caleb what she’s up to, because he just keeps sticking his nose in her business and getting in the way. (Sometimes he gets in the way in a very good way…he can make excellent use of a closet and whenever he and Sesily banter until they kiss and then some it is A+. Really, he just keeps showing up because he doesn’t want her to get hurt and she’s Sera’s sister, it’s not like he has feelings for her, squishy warm feelings because those are Very Inconvenient, but wow, does this man want Sesily in all the right ways, despite all his denials.) And it turns out Caleb has a secret of his own, one that could have lethal consequences if made public.
I loved this book. Sesily, Adelaide, Imogen, and Duchess (fyi, not her real name, but Sarah hasn’t given it to us, yet – I envision a Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover reveal at the end of Imogen’s book) are such good characters, warm, witty, sarcastic, supremely intelligent, and loving. The scenes where the four of them are just talking – and maybe giving Sesily shit about Caleb – are the best. And the work that they are doing, to protect vulnerable people in an era where those who were not cis-gendered, heterosexual, upper-class, rich white males had incredibly little institutional power to protect them, is satisfying to read on the page. And if you can get the audiobook, Mary Jane Wells is fantastic, an absolute genius when it comes to accents – her voice as Sesily with that North country accent really brings to the fore Sesily’s determination to rub her scandalous self in the faces of everyone who disapproves of her: she won’t even give them the satisfaction of raising her accent to acceptable ton levels.
I do still think that the narrative remained a little unbalanced – the reader already knew so much about Sesily, she had almost no secrets, but we knew very little about Caleb until later in the book and that threw the character balance off for me. That might have been it. Otherwise, great start to another series.
I’m a little annoyed that we have another book to wait before we get Imogen and Tommy (omg, I think Imogen might be my new favorite? I want her and Pippa to be friends. In the meantime, we can follow the #tommygoboom hashtag with some flash fanfic Jen Prokop makes up about them) but Adelaide and Clayborn ought to be good.
Dear FTC: I started with a digital galley but finished by borrowing the audiobook from my library via Libby (I’ll probably buy one, too).
Scuffed Slippers and Wormy Books 