Blameless (Parasol Protectorate #3) by Gail Carriger

Novel: Blameless (Parasol Protectorate #3) by Gail Carriger

Summary (from GoodReads.  Potential Spoilers for Book One!:  Quitting her husband's house and moving back in with her horrible family, Lady Maccon becomes the scandal of the London season.
Queen Victoria dismisses her from the Shadow Council, and the only person who can explain anything, Lord Akeldama, unexpectedly leaves town. To top it all off, Alexia is attacked by homicidal mechanical ladybugs, indicating, as only ladybugs can, the fact that all of London's vampires are now very much interested in seeing Alexia quite thoroughly dead.
While Lord Maccon elects to get progressively more inebriated and Professor Lyall desperately tries to hold the Woolsey werewolf pack together, Alexia flees England for Italy in search of the mysterious Templars. Only they know enough about the preternatural to explain her increasingly inconvenient condition, but they may be worse than the vampires -- and they're armed with pesto.

Characters: Lady Maccon is not having a very good time of things, but, as always, she makes the best.  As always, I love the way her character narrates, but this book made me come to appreciate that we sometimes get other points of view, specifically Professor Lyall.  I loved his view in this book, because he gave us a deeper understanding of Ivy Hisselpenny, who Alexia often takes for granted, but who seems to not be as dimwitted as she puts on.  Even though he is gone for most of the book, we get to know Lord Akeldama a little better at the end and there is definitely the promise of a bigger storyline for him in the next book.  Since he is one of my favorite characters, I can't complain.

Plot/Pacing:   I don't think this book is necessarily plotted any differently than the others, but it seems way more quest-like to me, when I prefer mysteries.  However, I was still invested and listened to the audiobook in only a few days.

Moments I Loved:  The Templars destroy all of the plates and utensils that Alexia uses because she is a preternatural and therefore unclean... the whole moment... hilarious.  I loved that she also sort of chased them around since they wouldn't look at her and were afraid of touching her.  Had I been in her shoes, I would have initiated a massive game of freeze tag.

WTF Moments: Someone is trapped in a huge ball under the Themes and it is creepy!!!  This scene was a little bit crazy and I loved it.

Narrators:  Same as last time: I think the narrator is fantastic.  She sounds proper and annoyed at the same time, but you can tell she is having fun.  Possibly, her narration is a little slow.  I sometimes thought she was talking too slow and I was listening to the book at 1.5x speed.  I'm going to try book four at 2x.

Overall:  I didn't love it as much as the first two, but I'm still psyched for the next two and can't wait for Carriger's new series... especially her young adult Finishing School series.

Blameless gets a FakeSteph rating of...