The Tattooed Duchess by Victor Gischler

Book Two in the Fire Beneath the Skin Kindle Series

Rating: Five out of Five Stars

These books are bomb diggity. I can’t bear to read them as a Kindle Series so I must wait until the whole thing comes out in one book. I assure you, it’s so worth the sweet sweet torture of waiting.

I like this series. Like really really like this series. It’s intricate and exciting and wonderfully fast-paced. Gischler plays quite a bit with mystery in this book and it adds much to the story. If you read a lot of YA, well actually, read ANYTHING a lot, eventually you figure out what to look for and what all the foreshadowing will lead to. I personally do this without trying and then I spend pages and pages waiting for the author to finally tell me what I already know. It’s quite depressing… but lo! Here come’s Mr. Victor and he does a nice job of not giving up too much too soon. This is no Gone Girl mystery, I assure you, but the plot doesn’t show it’s hand before it places it’s bet.

The thing that really shocked me, and still surprises me, is that a male writes this series. For some reason I cannot wrap my head around it. Perhaps it’s because our main protag is a female and he writes her impossibly well. I see and feel her as only a female written by a female. And that, my friends, makes him such a stellar writer. He’s not the first male author to write from a girl’s perspective (John Green, dear thing, is a master) but I find it so rare to genuinely embrace a character written by the opposite sex. It’s of course, a mark of a great author, and so I give my props to Victor Gischler.

My last comment on this book is simple. There’s some controversy about the vulgarity in this book; the foul language, the sex, sometimes the brutality of the fights. But I loved it. It would not be the same book without it. The Duchess would not be as likable if she didn’t chain smoke and and drop the F bomb once in awhile. So back off people and embrace the bad side a little.