A Little Bit Wicked
The cover promises a merry widow and a bad decision in red silk. The book hands you a woman who married at seventeen, watched it turn violent, and has spent ten years being told the ending was her fault.
Overview
The cover is lying to you
Judith, Lady Chester has money, a title, an excellent house and a policy. She picks the man. She picks the terms. She does not get attached. Nine years of widowhood and it has worked beautifully.
Then some viscount looks at her too long at a poetry reading so bad it qualifies as a hostage situation, and she blushes. Thirty years old, blushing like a debutante. She is livid about it.
Here is what the back cover will not tell you. She was married once, at seventeen, to a poet everybody called a genius, and by the end he had stopped being thrilling and started being dangerous. Then he died. She has spent ten years certain that part was her doing.
Gideon has his own version of the same hole. His marriage lasted a day.
So: two people with matching damage, negotiating an affair engineered so that neither of them ever has to risk anything again. You already know how that goes. Watching them get there is the entire point.
The boring bit
Receipts
Story plotline
Three doors, all of them spoil it rotten
This page stays clean. Those three do not, and they say so at the top.
The Plot
Start to finish, nothing withheld. A Twelfth Night ball, a freezing terrace, a bargain neither of them means, and a guest list assembled to humiliate a man in front of four hundred people.
Open the plot →
The Arcs
Her marriage lasted years and ruined her. His lasted a day and ruined him. The book runs both wounds side by side and never once points at the symmetry.
Open the arcs →
Tropes & Themes
Merry widow, the arrangement, the reformed rake. Then look at what “on my own terms” is actually doing once you know what she got out of.
Open tropes & themes →Characters
Who you are dealing with
Three here. Eight in the full post, and yes, one of them is the dog.
Judith, Lady Chester
Blonde, blue-eyed, thirty, and running her own life with the precision of a woman who lost control of it once. Gideon privately calls her a creature of light. He has no idea yet.
Gideon, Viscount Warton
Rich, handsome, dry as a bone, and wound so tight he squeaks. Susanna’s review: cold, superior, sarcastic, no fun whatsoever. She is right about the symptoms and wrong about the cause.
Susanna, Lady Dinsmore
Widow, best friend, roughly nine hundred relatives, zero filter. Decides Warton is wrong for Judith early and loudly, and keeps saying so while Judith very carefully does not correct her.
The series
Last Man Standing
Four friends who want nothing to do with marriage put up a shilling and a bottle of cognac on which of them holds out longest. Every book is one of them losing. This is the first man down.
The wager, and all five
Who bet what, who falls when, and the running order. Landing once books two to five have their art.
Series hub →Running order
1. A Little Bit Wicked
2. What A Lady Wants
3. Secrets of a Proper Lady
4. Seduction of a Proper Gentleman
5. Lady Amelia’s Secret Lover
Author
Victoria Alexander
Everything of hers on the shelf
Five titles across two worlds. Four of them are this wager. The fifth is an Effington book, which turns out to matter.
Author hub →Stay for the back matter
The novel ends with Alexander writing herself into a scene, pouring tea for six of her own Effington heroines and fumbling it, because she is a twenty-first century woman and they are not. It quietly bolts this series onto the Effington universe, and The Lady in Question is sitting on this same shelf.
RaeRae Reviews
The verdict
Review
Loves, hates, editorial. Chiefly: a book marketed as froth that is carrying something a lot heavier, and whether it earns the weight.
Read the review →Series review
Waiting on the other four. One book in, a five-book verdict would just be a guess in a nice font.
PendingRaeRae Reacts
Four scenes living rent free
Not the biggest moments in the book, necessarily. The ones that stayed. Two of them are charged, one is cruel, and one is the coldest room in the novel. Each opens into the full react.
Supper at hers
She insists they meet at her house and calls it home court advantage. Look at what is hanging on her walls.
The carriage to Spain
He threatens to steal her away to a beach forever. She lets herself picture it for one second, which is the most reckless thing she does all book.
The guest list
A hostess builds an invitation list specifically to humiliate a man, in public, with flawless manners. Coldest thing in the book.
Alexandra at the window
Ten years get rearranged in one conversation, in a freezing room with no fire lit. No music swells. It does not need any.
RaeRae Rants
One thing I am not letting go
Ten years of somebody else’s guilt
A grieving nineteen-year-old was allowed to believe she killed her husband. Not misled once in a bad moment, encouraged, for a decade. The apology arrives late and costs the apologiser precisely nothing.
Read the rant →Why this is a rant and not a complaint
Because the novel is doing it on purpose and doing it well. Bad books annoy you. Good books make you furious on behalf of someone who is not real.
Novel 101
Three things that make the plot make sense
Why the widow got all the fun
Maiden, wife, widow. Exactly one of the three could own property, run a household and pick her own company. Guess which one this book is about.
Read the 101 →
Married a day, annulled by morning
How a wedding got undone overnight, who had the power to do it, and what it left on the record. Gideon’s entire personality is a filing error.
Read the 101 →Red flags, green flags
Isolation, excuses, escalation, blame. The pattern in the order it happens, and the man in this same book who does the exact opposite. Hotness is not evidence.
Read the 101 →Plot, characters and descriptions come from the novel itself, summarized in our own words. Character art is original fan art. The cover is the publisher’s, shown to identify the edition. · The Library · More Victoria Alexander