{"id":292,"date":"2020-12-14T21:01:23","date_gmt":"2020-12-15T02:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/samiamreadingandreviewing.wordpress.com\/?p=292"},"modified":"2025-06-24T21:03:40","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T21:03:40","slug":"a-sinister-service-alyssa-maxwell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/?p=292","title":{"rendered":"A Sinister Service – Alyssa Maxwell"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Renshaw siblings are into intrigue again in the latest installment in the Lady and Lady\u2019s Maid mystery series. A Sinister Service<\/em> comes out on Jan 21, 2021, and if you want to follow the Renshaws into another cozy mystery with an unexpected ending, you won’t be disappointed with this book. My thanks to NetGalley and Kensington Books for the advanced copy!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lady Julia, Lady Amelia, Lady Phoebe, and Lord Fox are on a mission to buy their grandparents a set of anniversary china from a well-known company. While they\u2019re picking out their patterns, a tragedy arises in the form of the murder of one of the owners of the company, and the father of one of Fox\u2019s old school friends. When the police pick out the son as the likeliest suspect for his father’s murder, and appear to stop investigating in favor of his arrest, Lady Phoebe and her loyal maid, Eva, set to work trying to clear an innocent boy. The trip is not without its domestic squabbles, as well, as the siblings are staying at Lady Julia\u2019s husband\u2019s property – along with those that may inherit his estate, dependent on the gender of Lady Julia\u2019s unborn baby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the Lady and Lady\u2019s Maid mystery series can get a little tacky (mostly in the attitudes the characters show towards each other), it is a comforting and cozy series that won\u2019t get readers\u2019 heart rates up. It could, if it wanted to, but Maxwell writes in a true Cozy fashion where nothing is too explicit and most things are softly stated. For me, it\u2019s one of those series that isn\u2019t my favorite (I like intensity), but that I enjoy picking up and reading when I\u2019ve just read a few tense books in a row. It\u2019s nice knowing that everything is going to turn out to be okay for the Renshaws and that (apparently) murders don\u2019t affect them emotionally.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One thing that I may have noted before about this series is that Lady Phoebe and Eva\u2019s attitudes can grate on me a little bit after a while. Phoebe is generally kindhearted, and cares about her siblings, but she tends to order them about and try to be their mother, which annoys me. She has that attitude because her father charged her with looking after the family during the war (and after, as he never came home) and she really took that to heart. Little does she seem to realize that a. Her siblings are people with brains and are capable of change b. Her attitude of feeling responsible due to her father\u2019s command is a psychological issue (that I don\u2019t think is) likely to get resolved. Phoebe\u2019s self-righteousness gets a little old and I wish she would treat her siblings more like siblings than charges in her care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eva\u2019s attitude towards Phoebe and her sisters is just over-the-top, for me. In any moment of peril, she\u2019s ready to sacrifice herself so they might survive, and is outraged to the point of fury when they\u2019re not addressed as their titles command. It\u2019s this extreme that I don\u2019t understand – there\u2019s being fond of, proud of, and caring for your employers, but it\u2019s a whole other thing to sacrifice yourself for them. Eva is determined not to marry until her ladies don\u2019t need her anymore, and it just seems to me that she\u2019s too smart (think of all the mysteries she\u2019s helped solve) to live her life for someone else all the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think both Eva\u2019s and Phoebe\u2019s attitudes really stood out in this book, for whatever reason, but that didn\u2019t stop me from enjoying the read. It was relaxing, engaging, and I definitely didn\u2019t see the end coming. It also had enough of the personal drama woven into the plot that readers received a well-rounded book about the Renshaws. I am eager to read the next book to see whether Julia\u2019s baby will be a boy or a girl, the drama that unfolds from that, and what the siblings will get into next. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Renshaw siblings are into intrigue again in the latest installment in the Lady and Lady\u2019s Maid mystery series. A Sinister Service comes out on Jan 21, 2021, and if you want to follow the Renshaws into another cozy mystery with an unexpected ending, you won’t be disappointed with this book. My thanks to NetGalleyContinue reading “A Sinister Service – Alyssa Maxwell”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":294,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17,22,33,211,212,221,222,227,314,343,456,457],"class_list":["post-292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-advanced-readers-copy","tag-alyssa-maxwell","tag-arc","tag-kensington-books","tag-kensington-publishing","tag-lady-and-ladys-maid-mysteries","tag-lady-and-ladys-maid","tag-lay-and-ladys-maid","tag-phoebe-renshaw","tag-renshaw-family","tag-wwi","tag-wwi-mystery","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/a-sinister-service.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=292"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":648,"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292\/revisions\/648"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samiamreading.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}