The Silver Coin is certainly not the worst book I’ve ever read, but on so many levels, it just didn’t work for me. While it is technically an historical romance, it has a strong suspense plot which is the focus of the entire book. Unfortunately, I found it boring and not at all suspenseful.

Someone wants Lady Breanna Colby dead. At the end of The Gold Coin, Breanna’s cousin Stacie was almost killed by an assassin, but Breanna shot the assassin’s hand and Stacie was saved. Now said assassin is tanned, rested, and ready, and he intends to complete the task he set for himself. He will kill Stacie while Breanna watches, then he’ll do away with Breanna as well.

When Breanna receives her first threatening note, she runs straight to Bow Street. Unfortunately, the Runners already have their hands full investigating a string of murders among the nobility. But when a guard is killed near Breanna’s home, Stacie’s husband Damen decides to take action. He asks his friend and business associate, Royce Chadwick, to help him find the would-be killer. Royce is somewhat of an expert at finding people who do not wish to be found, so he agrees to help his friend.

It takes about fifty pages to get to this point. We know Royce and Breanna will fall in love. It takes another fifty pages for Breanna to even have a romantic thought about Royce. Then they rush headlong into each other’s arms, and the rest of the book is a series of repetitive scenes. Breanna receives notes and garishly mutilated statues from the killer. Lots of notes, and lots of statues. Every time she receives one, she becomes more and more afraid. I couldn’t understand why, because after the third one (there are seven!), they started to lose their impact. While Breanna was opening the packages, quaking in terror, I was thinking, “Ho hum, another statue with blood’ painted on it.”

That’s more or less it for the conflict. Breanna, Royce, Damen, and Stacie spend virtually the entire book inside the same house, waiting for the packages to arrive or the killer to come. The one bright spot is a sequence that takes place in Paris. None of the main characters are present, but at least something different goes on and it makes for a nice change of scene.

Part of the reason the book seems oddly lacking in suspense is that you really have no idea who the killer could be. Why? The reader is never even shown any possibilities. The characters never interact with any possible suspects, so you don’t get to sit and wonder who it could be. The villain is just some faceless, nameless monster, and when he does finally acquire a name and a face, it is basically meaningless.

There are other problems also, most significantly with the dialogue. The characters never have natural conversations; instead they sound eerily like carefully-scripted soap opera actors. Have you ever watched a soap opera or sit-com and thought how no one would really ever talk like that? Well, that is exactly the feeling one gets with this book.

There were actually a lot more problems, but those were the more glaring ones. Somewhere I am sure this book has an audience. But well before I’d read through all 465 pages, I knew I wasn’t part of it.