Review - Someone to Watch Over Me by Lisa Kleypas

Someone to Watch Over Me by Lisa Kleypas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Someone to Watch Over Me is the first in Lisa Kleypas’ Bow Street Runners series. In it, readers are introduced to the Bow Street Runners, an elite police force in London. One of the premier members of the unit - Grant Morgan, is alerted to a body found in the Thames. Upon investigating, he finds that the person, a young woman, is actually very much alive, and also someone he knows - Vivien Duvall, a prominent courtesan. Grant takes Vivien to his home, where he discovers that she has no memory at all of who she is. Determined to get revenge for a wrong she has done to him, Grant tells Vivien that she is his mistress and must stay with him, while he searches to find out who might have wanted to kill her. In the meantime, she tries to reconcile what he’s told her about herself with what she feels to be true inside.

The plot in this story is very interesting and engaging, although it seems to move pretty slowly at the beginning. The characters feel slightly undeveloped - it felt as though we didn’t really understand their thoughts and motivations, and if that understanding was necessary then it was shoehorned in at that point. One of the characters is confused about a decision that must be made, and beyond the dialogue the reader isn’t given much information about why the character is confused about what seems like an obvious choice. Later another character says something to the effect of “oh, this is why you always feel this way” in reference to a situation that the reader was never made aware of, so what was supposed to be a revelation was in fact entirely new material. Nonetheless, it was a good book and worth the read.

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