Secrets of the Eternal Rose by Fiona Paul

I freaking loved this series! Let's start out by making this clear. Clear? Good. So this series is about love and murder in Renaissance Vince Italy. Need more convincing to pick up this book? Fine. We follow this girl Cassandra, Cass for short, who is an orphan, lives with her aunt, and she gets into some trouble. She finds a dead body with an X slashed on her chest and she can't let it go. So this first book is about her trying to figure out who is causing all of these murders. She also is getting involved with this broke artist, Falco when she is already engaged to another man, Luca. That's the basic plot of the first book, Venom. I won't go into detail about the plot of the second or third books, Belladonna and Starling, but I will touch on the non-plot aspects of them later on.

So I'm going to start out by talking about the excerpts from the Book of the Eternal Rose which you get at the beginning of each chapter from the very start of the series. I loved these excerpts which I don't think I've ever said before. In any other book, I read the first few and I get tired of them so I stop reading them but in this book, I couldn't get enough of them. They are so interesting because some them are thought provoking and others are just down right cynical. And you see the progression of these two extremes and the books go on and the characters learn more about the mystery.

The writing style was also beautiful. I usually don't notice the writing unless it is really bad or really good and this was absolutely the latter. There are little quotes throughout the series that I just had to stop and appreciate them because I thought they were so good.

The characters were really fun. I loved Cass and how she wasn't exactly as proper as her aunt would have liked. She was a little bit off from that and I related to her a lot throughout the books. Falco is officially one of my book boyfriends now. He is so charming and funny and likes adventure every once in a while. I adore him. Luca, well, he was there. I don't have anything against him but I don't think he was as developed as the other characters. He was a little too selfless and too good at controlling his feelings so I didn't know what he was thinking or feeling a lot of the time. As for the villains in the story, I don't know their motives all of the time. Or, I did but I didn't know the reason behind those motives, but, more on that later.

So, the three main selling points of this series are the setting, the romance, and the mystery. The setting was perfect. It was what set this novel apart from other murder mysteries. It was executed perfectly. I'm not one much for history so I can't tell you how accurate it is, sorry. The romance was amazing, like I said, Falco is bae. Yes. I went there. Judge me if you must. There is a love triangle that develops the further into the series between these three but Falco is perfection.

The mystery. This is where we run into trouble. In the beginning, there isn't anything necessarily wrong with it other than it's relatively generic. Cass and Falco are no Sherlock and Watson. The way they go after the killer is very much like an inexperienced person would today. It does make for some less than exciting scenes but it is realistic.

The real issue that I have with this series is toward the end. Literally the last twenty pages are just out of place. The whole time your reading the series it's setting you up for it to end a certain way and in the last chapters, it does a complete one eighty and ends differently. It's almost like she wanted the story to end one way but someone told her to make and end a different was at the last second and she agreed just to make them happy, not because she wanted it to end that way. In one aspect of the story, anyway. There were still a lot of unanswered questions at the end of it, for example, what were the killers' motives? Who were they, really? Their full backstory. None of that was answered. This makes the mystery seem super underdeveloped, like it was still in the first stages of writing. The author had an outline, but she didn't color it in. So the ending was completely unsatisfying to me but because it was so underwhelming, I find it easy to live in denial and pretend those last twenty pages aren't there.

All in all, I still love this series. Even if the ending isn't great, I do still think it's worth your time. The series is amazing just ignore that ending. Also, side note, COVER CHANGE! NO! WHY? The image I'm using is the original cover but they changed them. I'm upset. They're all pretty, but the originals were so much better. Ugh, publishing companies why? Any way, this series is one of my favorites, highly recommend it, 5 out of 5 stars, except for that ending.