Into temptation

I feel like it's taken me quite a long time to work through all 3 books in Penny Vincenzi's Spoils of Time trilogy, and I think on each occassion I've found my way back to the story of the Lytton family and their publishing business I've found myself able to engage very easily with the characters and their stories again.

This third and final book in the trilogy, Into Temptation, was a real mammoth book to work through at a hefty 700 plus pages it was always going to be one you needed to commit to. I found that this was all very well, however where books 1 and 2 had focused upon the first and second world wars as their backrops which gave them something to bounce stories off of this book failed to have a similar historical event upon which to pin it's characters fates. Instead we begin in the 1950's in the senior years of our heroine of the trilogy Celia Lytton. She is preparing to marry after the death of her first husband Oliver and her children are less than happy with her choice. In fact instead of marrying her lover of many years Sebastian she has chosen instead to marry a man whom she has little romantic interest in at all.

The family business is still being run largely by family members, including Celia's son Giles and one of her twin daughters Venetia along with her nephew Jay Lytton. Celia's ongoing involvement in the business and their perception that her ideas are now outdated mean that they would like nothing more than Celia to retire, but shes not prepared to do that just yet, or is she?

The American branch of Lytton's is firmly in the hands of Barty, the adopted daughter of Celia and her first husband Oliver. She and her daughter Jenna are living off the fortune left to them by her husband Lawrence but Celia is lonely and suddenly one of daughter's school chums introduces her father Charlie and she dares to think maybe she could love someone again.

I hate to say but this book, whilst having some flashes of good storyline also had a tendency to drag them out overly. I love Barty as a character but the ongoing contracted storyline of her romance and marriage to Charlie Patterson became one of the more tedious ones in the book for me. It was patently clear from the outset he was not to be trusted and his scheming and money grabbing became something that should have lasted one part of the book but instead dragged throughout the whole 700 pages. I didn't buy that Bary who had previously been a very strong charater would have allowed him to continue acting that way for so long without taking very direct and decisive action.

If I were to review the position of the characters at the start of the book and compared it against where they ended I unfortunately felt that may of them hadn't been moved forward at all. Giles Lytton became a sidelined charater who was referred to ocassionally but was a missed opportunity in my opinion. In fact, because we had moved forward so far with the family since book one that we now had to deal not just with Celia and the first generation family but also the children, grandchildren and great granchildren's stories all in the one book. This means very few were given main storylines, instead they flitted in and out ocassionally but I craved more time with some and that wasn't always allowed.

The trilogy overall was a good story but my favourite was firmly Book 1, No Angel. The time setting, the worries of the Great War and the development of the family in the early years made for a more engaging read that we had by the time we got to Book 3. Instead we lacked focus on a small cast, lost a historical even in which the family could engage their stories and lost our attention to the family business in deferrence to managing the huge number of people the book had to cover. This was a real shame, it wouldn't stop me from reading Vincenzi again as Book One demonstrated the quality of writing of which she is capable, it's just a shame the Lytton clan became so unweildy that it caused a huge management of them in Book 3 to lead to loss of drama.