Burning Lamp (An Arcane Society Novel)

Newly returned to London from the American wild west, Adelaide Pyne possesses a strong paranormal skill for reading dreamprints and a dangerous lamp. In the midst of being kidnapped, she is rescued by the mysterious Griffin Winters, a notorious crime lord who claims that he will go mad unless Adelaide agrees to help him undo the curse his great grandfather wrought on him by working the lamp with him. Of course, Griffin possesses powerful abilities of his own which serve him well in his line of work.
The lamp in her keeping was invented by Griffin's mentally unstable ancestor who thought to enhance his paranormal abilities threefold,and also surpass his rival Sylvester Jones, but instead the lamp proved his undoing. The lamp is meanwhile being sought by a ruthless, highly placed member in the Arcane Society.
The Burning Lamp is the second book in a series called the Dream Light Trilogy, each book is written in the repsective style of Jayne Castle's pseudonymns. By Amanda Quick standards this story is definitely not up to her old standards. Her characters are pleasant, but not captivating. The personal history and details are there, but somehow they come across flat and not fully developed. The process of Adelaide and Griffin falling in love is nearly instantaneous with little challenge or growth required on either character's part. The barriers to their relationship were almost nil, and too easily overcome. The sense of danger is present, but not gripping. The plot is well trodden and fairly predictable. Several familiar characters from previous stories pop up in this one, but have little real impact on the story.
When I finished the book I felt somewhat dissappointed. Overall a pleasant story, but not overly memorable.

I absolutely love Amanda Quick's arcane society novels and with the Burning Lamp, she finds a way to introduce uniqueness and novelty to the new characters, but overall, it doesn't quite have the magic, wit, and tension that makes her novels so great. The story follows a new bloodline in the Arcane mythos, that of Nicholas Winters, who was the arch enemy of Sylvester Jones centuries back when the two were obsessed with trying to enhance their own powers. In Nicholas Winter's attempts, he created a curse on his descendants for which madness is inevitable, unless they can find a woman to manipulate the powers of a device known as the Burning Lamp. One such woman is Adelaide Pyne.

After the early death of her parents, a terrified fifteen year old Adelaid is spirited away to a school for young orphans, only to find that said school is actually a brothel. A man by the name of Mr. Smith with dark powers has arranged to have Adelaide in some sort of perverse sexual ceremony that will enhance his abilities. Adelaide manages to escape, steals a strange artifact from Mr. Smith, and flees to America. Thirteen years later, after working in carnivals and sideshows, while making wise investments, an independant Adelaide senses she must come back to England, where she immediately takes up a cause to bring down as many brothels and help the poor young women take back their lives, teaching them helpful skills and creating new identities for them. In her efforts, she becomes the target of two major crime lords. One is the owner of the brothels and the other is Griffin Winters, descendant of Nicholas Winters.

After his 36th birthday, Griffin is showing signs that the legendary curse of madness is real and is tracking down both the lamp and Adelaide. His powers sense that she is the one who can manipulate the lamp and he arranges to meet with her and keep her out of danger until she can help him reverse the curse. To his good fortune, not only can she manipulate the powers of the Burning Lamp but she actually has the lamp in her posession. Adelaide agrees to help him reverse the madness which approaches and in doing so the two find themselves in a heated relationship while they run from the danger that's chasing after them from every angle.

The angle of a crime lord falling for a reformist is a new twist for Quick. The fact that the never married Adelaide is not a virgin and has in fact had several lovers is also unique for her stories. Weaving in Caleb and Lucinda Jones from the Perfect Poison to monitor and possibly kill our "hero" is certainly not expected, but even with these new elements to keep the story fresh, it lacks the tension and chemistry that are typical of her relationships. Everything falls into place and seems like a story by numbers. The danger doesn't feel dangerous. There's no emotion in their emotions, and the chemistry is not combustible. It's truly a good story but it's missing the magic, humor and tension between our two leads that somehow makes it a little off. Just a little too go with the flow.

Like most Jayne Ann Krentz/Amanda Quick books, this is a well-written romance with intelligent characters and a strong sense of place. Like most Krentz/Quick books of the last 7-8 years, it is utterly predictable in plot and character types. Krentz really likes rough and cynical male leads who are transformed by their love for quick-witted, capable, idealistic female leads, and I have to say that aspect of her books still works for me (romance is fantasy, after all!). I also really like the way her characters create their own "families" by gathering together people who matter to them. But her plots have become tired retreads, her characters seem to be interchangeable from one book to the next, and the clever banter that used to bring the leads together has become somewhat mechanical.

This is by no means a bad read, but neither is it a book that you'll remember. Krentz used to write books like that (sigh).

I am a raving Amanda Quick fan. I gave this book 4 stars out of habit, loyalty and deep appreciation of past pleasure. Having said all that, I thought that this book was a 2 1/2 star. The main characters, Adalaide and Griffin have cool names and even cooler back stories. Unfortunately, this reader never got to know either one. Adalaide is a "social reformer" who goes after brothels and literally smokes out the badness. How cool is that?! But we never get a full blown, first-person account of one of these raids. So, in affect, I never really felt like I got to KNOW Adalaide when I was denied the experience of seeing her in action; doing that which defined her person. This also was the case with Griffin. Apparently, he is a feared crime lord who rules half of the London underworld...just not the "bad" stuff like opium and prostitution, bless his lonely heart. Again, if he is so fearsome and controlling, let's see him in action. But alas, there was not enough of that in the book.

I know that the real story lies w/ the lamp and the dreamworks, etc. But I need more. I need more character development and passion. Now the question is, will I find that in the third installment? Who knows. That is in the future...literally.

This historical, paranormal romance is part of two different Jayne Ann Krentz series. The first is the Arcane Society. The second is the Dreamlight Trilogy. She has written books for both of these series under her own name and her two pseudonyms, Amanda Quick and Jayne Castle. Even though this is the second book of a trilogy, The Burning Lamp is very accessible for those who choose to read it as a standalone book.

TBL is set in London in the late-Victorian era. Its core story is a classic "Beauty and the Beast" romance, and the book itself could easily have been titled, "The Crime Lord and the Reformer." The story is told primarily from the point of view of the two romantic leads, twenty-eight-year-old Adelaide Pyne and thirty-six-year-old Griffin Winters, with occasional forays into the heads of important subcharacters and the two main villains.

Adelaide is known only as The Widow to the teenage girls she has rescued from a life of forced prostitution. Adelaide offers these girls refuge at an academy she funds from her personal fortune where they receive vocational training so they can support themselves and remake their lives. None of the people who run the academy and none of the girls she has rescued have ever seen Adelaide's face. She covers herself with a widow's veil in order to keep her identity secret from the owner of the brothels she has raided.

Like Adelaide, Griffin Winters's face has never been seen by anyone other than a handful of his closest associates. The mysterious crime lord presides over an underworld empire in London consisting of numerous business enterprises, the exact nature of which is never specified in the book. There are only a few things that we find out for sure about his criminal activities. First, there are two pursuits he refuses to engage in (and we never learn why), the opium trade and prostitution. Secondly, he doesn't enjoy using violence. The evidence for this is that his "enforcers," the muscle working for him, use bribes to acquire useful information around London, not force. And we learn from his history and actions that he never kills unless he absolutely has to.

Adelaide and Griffin both have paranormal powers. Adelaide can work "dreamlight," which allows her to both heal and harm others--up to and including killing people--using the power of the light emissions of dreams. The talent Griffin has had since his youth is the ability to cloak himself in shadows. He can choose to merely obscure his face--which is how he conceals it from the world--or make himself entirely invisible. But recently he has suddenly developed a second psychical talent, which is an extremely rare and dangerous event among those with paranormal gifts. A person with more than one talent is called a "Cerberus," and is believed to inevitably become criminally insane.

Griffin is already a criminal, but he is terrified of going insane. He would rather be dead. Griffin's lineage is far more likely to periodically produce offspring who have the potential to become a Cerberus because of the "Winters curse." An ancestor of his from several centuries ago, Nicholas Winters, was an eccentric alchemist. He created the burning lamp of the book's title in order to amplify his psychical talent and develop additional ones as well. The results of that experiment were madness and death, in spite of, or because of, the assistance of his lover. She was a woman who, like Adelaide, worked dreamlight, and she and Nicholas passed on through their lineage the curse of, every several generations, a descendant developing a second, or even a third, paranormal talent around their thirty-sixth birthday. As Griffin's new talent becomes stronger, and he experiences accompanying nightmares and hallucinations, he is positive madness is inevitable, unless he accomplishes two things. He needs to find the burning lamp, which was stolen from his family two decades before, and he needs the help of a woman who can work dreamlight. Only with her assistance in utilizing the burning lamp can Griffin hope to reverse the curse by getting rid of the new psychical talent he has developed.

In Adelaide Pyne, Griffin thinks he has found both of the things he needs. She has possessed the lamp for the past thirteen years and her dreamlight talent is as potent as Griffin's own two very strong talents. But though Adelaide agrees to help Griffin, accomplishing his goal is anything but assured. He and Adelaide have powerful, psychically talented enemies who will stop at nothing to destroy Griffin and kidnap Adelaide in order to force her to unleash the power of the lamp on their behalf.

I am a huge fan of Jayne Ann Krentz. I've read everything she's ever written, but I am particularly fond of her paranormal, romantic-suspense novels. I love her strong heroines who are fully capable of going head-to-head with her dynamic, wounded heroes. I love the sparring they engage in and the way they form a team to take down the evil villains of the story. This book has all those things in spades. I've been enjoying the Arcane Society series very much, especially the way Krentz has stretched it across generations by setting some of the books in the present, some in the past, and with her third book in this Dreamlight Trilogy, incorporating it into Harmony, her futuristic, Jayne Castle series. My favorite series of all the ones she's written is the Harmony series, so that's a two-for-one for me.

I think the characterization, plotting, action, romance, setting, paranormal elements, all are excellent in this book. And I like the way that the hero and heroine are both mysterious people who each shroud their faces. No one has ever seen them the way they can see each other, so when they lift their physical and paranormal facial veils for each other, they bare their hearts and minds as well.

There is only one aspect of the book that rather bothered me. As I mentioned above, Krentz/Quick never spells out what precisely Griffin's criminal enterprises are. His work is presented as his obsession. Therefore, if we as readers don't know what that work is, we are left without vital information to understand his motivation, which arises from ethics, personal philosophy and personality. Simply having Griffin behave honorably toward the heroine and never do anything that looks remotely criminal in the book (in spite of being a "crime lord") did not satisfy me as a reader that he is truly deserving of Adelaide. I wanted to know what Griffin's crimes were, his motivation for engaging in them, and strong signs across the course of the story that he has powerfully changed from a criminal to an honest man.

Across the entire book, right up to the end, since Griffin never commits a single crime on stage in the story, and we never hear about any of his criminal activities, I frankly kept waiting to hear that he had been running a huge scam against the underworld the past twenty years. That maybe he never has committed any real crimes and that, just like his ability to be physically shrouded in shadows, his so-called evil reputation has been only an illusion. I thought he might be a kind of underworld Robin Hood, robbing from the real "crime lords" and returning the ill-gotten gains to their rightful owners. Or perhaps only preying on the powerful members of so-called legitimate society who use their privileged social position to get away with crimes without ever being seen as criminals. But, no, that is not the case.

If this were not a romance novel, and in particular, A Krentz romance novel, I might not have a problem with any of that, since the foreground of the story is very compelling and I did enjoy the relationship between the "crime lord and the reformer." But this is the first time in all the years I've been reading Krentz that, to my recollection, she's failed to do one of several things for a "dark and dangerous" (D&D) hero: (a) Mr. D&D turns out to be a truly noble guy suffering from an unearned bad reputation; (b) Mr. D&D has a noble motivation for the dark things he's done; (c) Mr. D&D was pulled into dark activities in his naïve youth and has since repented of his past actions and is currently a stand-up guy. In this book, the hero is smack in the middle of his dark, anti-hero lifestyle as the book starts.

An additional wrinkle in my problem with Griffin's unmentioned crimes is this: Adelaide has an out-of-character lack of curiosity about them. She has no problem confronting him about everything else. Why would she not ask him, as she grows closer to him physically, psychically, and emotionally: What do you do for a living as a crime lord? Do you kidnap people for ransom? Do you run guns? Do you rob banks? Do you manipulate the stock market? Do you run crooked gambling dens? Do you commit blackmail? Do you embezzle? What are your crimes?

Because of that problem, I lowered the book from 5 to 4 stars. I didn't lower the score any further than that because all the other elements were so well done.