Second Sight

by · 2006

Genre: Fiction

Rating: 4.2/5

A Victorian romance with a paranormal gloss, Second Sight is sleek, witty, and very much aware of the pleasures of secrecy. Its mystery is slimmer than its atmosphere, but the character work and pacing carry it well.

Second Sight turns Victorian gothic flirtation into an efficient machine for desire, danger, and hidden knowledge.

Jayne Ann Krentz’s Second Sight is not a novel that pretends to reinvent romance; it understands the pleasures of the form and arranges them with unusual confidence. What it offers instead is composure, atmosphere, and a brisk intelligence about secrecy—though the book is more persuasive when it is setting its tableau than when it is straining toward mystery.

Set in Victorian England and launched around the formation of the Arcane Society, the novel pairs Venetia Milton, a financially precarious photographer with an uncanny sensitivity to auras, with Gabriel Jones, a brooding collector whose private house and private habits both advertise concealment. Their meeting is less a coincidence than a mechanism: Venetia is hired to document strange objects, and the work gives Krentz a tidy excuse to move her heroine through locked rooms, shadowed galleries, and social arrangements that are as revealing as any confession. The premise is built for suspense, but the real attraction is tonal—the book keeps a steady pulse of wit and erotic negotiation while letting the paranormal remain suggestive rather than overexplained.

Krentz is at her best here when she lets the domestic and the occult rub against each other. Venetia’s profession matters; her camera is not a decorative prop but a way of seeing, and the novel repeatedly links observation to power, class, and self-possession. She is not written as a passive beneficiary of rescue but as a woman trying to leverage her own skills into economic survival, which gives the romance more friction than it might otherwise have. Gabriel, meanwhile, is drawn with the familiar Amanda Quick mixture of competence, secrecy, and vulnerability, and the friction between the two is genuinely enjoyable because each recognizes the other as a keeper of secrets before either can claim moral authority.

Formally, the book moves with remarkable efficiency. Krentz knows how to braid a romance plot to a suspense plot so that each chapter advances courtship while also withholding answers; the result is a novel that feels engineered rather than merely assembled. That engineering is a strength, though it also means the prose rarely lingers long enough to become luscious in the way gothic fiction sometimes can. Instead, the pleasure is in control: the author parcels out revelations, calibrates banter, and allows the setting to do some of the emotional labor. The Arcane Society material gives the series its larger architecture, but in this first volume the architecture is felt more as promise than burden.

My reservation is that the book’s mystery is not as interesting as its premise suggests. The paranormal artifacts, shadowy informants, and secret histories create the atmosphere of a more intricate conspiracy than the novel finally delivers; once the romantic line settles into place, the suspense elements begin to feel like a scaffold the book has already outgrown. There is also a familiar Amanda Quick tendency toward self-awareness in the seduction scenes—amusing at first, but a touch repetitive by the middle, as if the novel were slightly too pleased with its own flirtation. In a book this polished, the weakness is not incompetence but a certain predictability of destination.

Still, Second Sight succeeds because it knows the contract it is making with the reader and honors it with style. The pleasures here are cumulative rather than explosive: a heroine who refuses economic helplessness, a hero whose reserve conceals more than it announces, and a fictional world that treats psychic ability as both inheritance and liability. For readers who want historical romance with an occult edge, it is a smart, disciplined opening to the Arcane Society sequence. It is not the deepest novel Krentz has written, but it is one of the more gracefully proportioned ones.

Key Takeaways

Summary

Chapter Guide

Chapter 1: Arcane House and the Photograph
Venetia Milton arrives at Arcane House to catalog its antiquities for the secretive Jones family, hoping the work will rescue her from financial and social precarity. The house’s strange atmosphere and Gabriel Jones’s unsettling intelligence immediately suggest that the objects being recorded are not merely decorative.
Chapter 2: A Proposal in Disguise
Venetia and Gabriel are drawn into a practical alliance that requires them to present themselves as husband and wife, a fiction that gives their attraction a dangerous, intimate edge. Around them, the Arcane Society’s internal rivalries begin to sharpen into something more lethal.
Chapter 3: The Missing Notebook
A centuries-old notebook vanishes from Arcane House, and with it the possibility of understanding the formula said to amplify psychic gifts. Venetia and Gabriel realize that the theft is part of a deliberate campaign against the Jones family and anyone who can read the signs it leaves behind.
Chapter 4: Widow’s Mask in London
Back in London, Venetia reinvents herself as Mrs. Jones, using respectability as both armor and instrument. Her new life as a gallery owner depends on the very performance that threatens to expose her to scandal and to the man she thought dead.
Chapter 5: The Returned Mr. Jones
Gabriel reappears alive, forcing Venetia to confront the emotional cost of the story she has told herself about him. Their reunion is edged with mistrust and recognition; each knows the other has been altered by the interval between loss and return.

Read the full review at https://reviewerinsight.com/book/6a03d41a67b7ef01e2c98590/second-sight

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