Tag: England

Day 279: The Serpent’s Tale

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Cover for The Serpent's TaleIn the first of the Mistress of the Art of Death series (minor spoilers ahead), Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, a medieval pathologist, solved a series of murders for the English King Henry II and fell in love with one of his soldiers, Rowley Picot. She declined his marriage proposal because he expected to be rewarded a baronetcy as a result of their success and she knew that as a baronet’s wife she would not be allowed to pursue her medical profession. As a more humble citizen she has a lot more freedom. So, they parted and, to his horror, he was made the Bishop of St. Albans.

In this second book, taking place almost two years later, Rowley fetches her for another mission. She is bubbling over with resentment because she has borne him a daughter, Ally, whom he has not acknowledged.

Rowley is on what he hopes is a preemptive mission. Using poison mushrooms, someone has attempted to murder Rosamund the Fair, Henry II’s mistress, and blame it on his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine. In an effort to avoid civil war, Rowley wants Adelia to help him figure out who ordered the attempt before Henry hears of it.

But Adelia has bad news for him. The basket of mushrooms he brought to show her contains nightcaps, and Adelia explains that Rosamund may seem to have improved, but she is already dead.

In a frozen winter landscape, Adelia and Rowley travel first to a convent and then to the fantastic Wormwood Tower to investigate the crime, where Rosamund’s body lies protected by a labyrinth and an insane lady’s maid.

Franklin’s series is well written and carefully researched. Although she admits to taking a few liberties with historical characters in this book, for the most part it is historically based on Eleanor’s revolt against Henry in favor of her oldest son.

Franklin sets up a vivid backdrop in the icy English landscape, which plays more than an incidental part in the plot. In addition, she has the ability to make us care about Adelia and Ally, Rowley, Mansur, and Glytha, the main recurring characters. It is with sadness that I heard not long ago of Franklin’s death, and I regret that there are only four books in this series.

Day 276: The Best of Friends

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Cover for The Best of FriendsJoanna Trollope writes contemporary novels about real people with realistic problems who live in small British towns and villages. It is one pleasure of reading her that she seldom presents you with a trite ending with all the loose ends tied in a pretty package.

Gina Sitchell and Laurence Wood have been friends since school but were never romantically involved. Their relationship was one that Hilary made sure she understood before agreeing to marry Laurence. Around the time of their marriage, Gina came home to Whittingbourne from living in France and soon married Fergus Bedford, an antiques dealer, and Gina and Hilary became fast friends. Now, twenty years later, Laurence and Hilary run a thriving hotel in the historical Bee House and have three boys. Gina and Fergus live with their only daughter Sophy in a home that Fergus has lovingly restored.

The marriage dynamic of Gina and Fergus has always been to argue, loudly and often. To Gina, nothing has changed, so perhaps that is why she is so shocked and overcome when Fergus coldly informs her that he is leaving her, has indeed been waiting for Sophy to get older before he did so. Then he takes exactly half of the furniture and goes.

Gina is so devastated that she imposes herself on Laurence and Hilary, leaving 16-year-old Sophy in limbo between her own, now unfamiliar home and her grandmother Vi’s tiny apartment. Sophy, who adores her father, is heartbroken and furious.

Between the diverse tasks of managing the hotel and raising three teenage boys and the burden of Gina’s presence, Hilary, first sympathetic, grows tired of the toll Gina’s drama is taking on her household. When Laurence isn’t working as the hotel chef, he seems to be spending all his time comforting Gina. Little does Hilary suspect that her own family life will soon be disrupted by Laurence’s discovery that he loves Gina.

Trollope creates fully realized characters in the two couples but also in their children, and in Vi and her aged suitor. Not all of them are likeable, but they are all convincingly human. I felt sorry for Gina at first, but my sympathy was soon evaporated by her self-centeredness and willingness to wreak havoc with her friend’s family. Fergus seems almost heartless at first, but we soon grow to understand him a little better. None of Trollope’s characters are bad, just people with ordinary complicated personalities who see things from their own points of view.

Trollope creates a story that you want to see resolved but never takes shortcuts to provide a typical happy ending, in fact seldom invents plots for which there could be one. Her novels are for adults, and they deftly explore the complexities and confusions of being human.

Day 270: The Secret Garden

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Cover for The Secret GardenBest Book of the Week!
The Secret Garden was one of my favorite books as a young girl. I recently had occasion to reread it and was surprised to find it just as entertaining as I remembered. I also noticed for the first time how beautifully written it is.

We might be inclined to sympathize with ten-year-old Mary Lennox at the beginning of the novel. After all, she has survived a cholera outbreak in India that killed her parents, and she was left alone when the remaining servants abandoned the house. But Mary is spoiled and bad-tempered. She goes to live with her uncle, Archibald Craven, in Yorkshire, and she doesn’t like anything she sees. The food is horribly bland. The house is located on a desolate stretch of moor, and her uncle isn’t even there, so she is to be kept by servants. Well, she knows how to handle servants.

To her surprise, the English servants are not afraid of her temper; they expect her to do as she’s told. Largely left to her own devices, she explores the huge, rambling house and the gardens around it. Her young maid Martha tells her the story of a secret garden that used to belong to Uncle Archibald’s wife. His wife died, and he had the garden locked and the key buried.

Running around outside, Mary starts to improve her health and temper. She makes friends with a robin, and Martha’s mother sends her a jump rope. Soon she is rosy-cheeked and stops turning her nose up at the food.

Mary makes the acquaintance of the taciturn gardener, Ben Weatherstaff, and eventually finds the door and the key to the secret garden. The plants are dead, because it is early spring, but she wonders if the garden can’t be revived with a little help. She gives Martha some of her allowance to buy gardening tools, and Martha’s young brother Dickon delivers them. Dickon is a fascinating boy who roams the moors and makes friends with the animals, and with Mary. Soon, both Mary and Dickon are working every day in the secret garden.

Her nights have occasionally been disturbed by someone crying. One night she follows the noise and finds that a boy is living in the house, her cousin Colin. He is an invalid who has not been out of his bed for years, and he is even more spoiled than Mary. After putting him in his place, Mary begins to feel sorry for him. She reads him stories and tells him about the secret garden as if it were story, but he soon figures out that it is true. Eventually, she and Dickon take him out into the garden in a wheelchair.

This book is a tale about how living things can heal bodies and minds. As Mary’s health improves and she works in the garden, her temper improves. The magic of the garden brings Mary together with her friends and eventually reunites the Craven family.

Day 266: Found Wanting

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Cover for Found WantingI usually enjoy Robert Goddard’s convoluted thrillers, but this one seems a bit far-fetched.

Richard Eusden is a proper civil servant who has been estranged from his best friend Marty Hewitson for some years because of the latter’s drug habit and unreliability. Richard is on his way to work one morning when he gets a call from his ex-wife, Gemma, who has agreed to pick up an attaché case from Marty’s aunt and bring it to him in Denmark. Gemma wants Richard to go in her place. She tells Richard that Marty is dying of cancer.

Richard reluctantly agrees, only to find a stranger at the rendezvous instead of Marty. The stranger says Marty has been kidnapped and tells him his friend will die unless he hands over the case.

Richard chases the case and Marty through Germany, Denmark, and Finland, and ends up discovering a dark sectret that involves the Romanov’s last fortune, the Grand Duchess Anastasia, and the Tsarevich.

The novel has so many briefly drawn characters that I could not keep track of them. I also didn’t really buy that Richard would go through all of this for a man he had already established couldn’t be trusted. But ultimately my judgment is that this is silly stuff.

Day 265: Here Was a Man: A Novel of Sir Walter Raleigh and Elizabeth I

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Cover for Here Was a ManI don’t think I’ve read anything by Norah Lofts before, but even though she was a prolific historical novelist, I would rate this effort as mediocre.

Here Was a Man attempts to draw most of Raleigh’s life in a short space and does so by a series of vignettes illustrating important events. Although I am not completely familiar with his career, I know that Lofts  has chosen to portray a couple of apocryphal events, in particular the cloak in the mud story, which I believe has no basis in fact. The other serious lack of the novel is any depth of characterization.

The novel begins with Raleigh as a teenager, listening to sailors’ tales and dreaming of traveling the seas. He is also full of ambition for worldly success, an ambition that sometimes works to his disadvantage.

We are told many times about Raleigh’s sense of adventure, but we don’t really feel it. In fact, he seems to spend more time in prison than on his adventures. It is curious, too, that although he has many enemies at court, at least in this novel he has done nothing to earn their enmity. I would doubt that was really the case.

Raleigh is probably a character who could support an interesting and exciting novel, but this is not it. To be fair, it looks like it may have been one of Lofts’ first works.

Day 263: A Great Deliverance

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Cover for A Great DeliveranceAlthough Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley series seems to be floundering with the past few books, the first dozen or so were really good. A Great Deliverance is the first one in the series.

Father Hart comes to Scotland Yard to ask for help. Roberta Teys, the daughter of a farmer, has been found in the barn next to the bodies of her father and the family dog, both of whom have been attacked with an ax. Father Hart begs for someone to investigate the apparently open-and-shut case, as Roberta has confessed to the crime and now refuses to speak. Father Hart says he believes the girl, who seems to be mentally handicapped, is innocent. Barely registering in the background, someone is killing men on the subway.

Inspector Thomas Lynley is given the Teys case, and he has just been assigned Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers as his partner. Havers is a belligerent, untidy working-class woman who is being given a final chance, since she has failed to work well with other supervisors. She believes that the immaculate Lynley, the eighth Earl of Asherton, is nothing but an upper-class fashion plate, playboy, and womanizer.

Lynley is dealing with his own problems, because the woman he loves is about to marry his best friend, Simon St. James. He also bears guilt because St. James is crippled from an auto accident in which Lynley was driving. Lynley is actually relieved to be called away from the wedding reception to deal with the murder investigation.

Lynley thinks the roots of this murder may be in the past. Roberta’s mother disappeared when she was a child. Was she actually murdered? Roberta’s older sister also ran away from home. What happened to her?

This novel and the first books of this series perfectly meet my taste for mystery novels that are on the dark side. I find Lynley and Havers to be engaging, with fully developed personalities. The novels are complex and the plots exciting. I have not tired of the incidental characters, as I often do. I am just sorry that the more recent novels have taken some turns I do not find appealing or interesting, since for so many years, I could rely on an Elizabeth George mystery to be a great read.

Day 261: Blue Monday

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Cover for Blue MondayI never read Nicci French before and was at first irritated by Blue Monday because the reader is introduced to several characters, using a shifting third-person limited narration, without understanding who they are or why they’re important. Eventually, though, I was able to fasten on Frieda Klein as the main character.

The novel begins in 1985, with nine-year-old Rosie going home from school, followed by her five-year-old sister Joanna. Rosie takes her eyes off Joanna briefly, and the little girl is gone.

Twenty-two years later, a little boy, Matthew Faraday, disappears on his way home from school after his mother is late picking him up. Although at first the crimes don’t seem to be connected, Detective Chief Inspector Karlssen thinks they may be.

Psychiatrist Frieda Klein has recently taken on a new patient, Alan Dekker, who claims to be having such troubling obsessions that he can’t sleep or function correctly. They are about having a son, a boy he can play ball with. He is unable to have children but he doesn’t want to adopt. He obsessively wants a son, one who looks like him as a boy–exactly like the missing Matthew Faraday.

Confidentiality laws apparently not being exactly the same in England as they are in the states, after some soul searching, Frieda feels she must go to the police. Karlssen is impatient with her until she tells him that Alan had these feelings once before about having a daughter but they went away–just around the time of Joanna’s disappearance.

This psychological thriller, which is the first in a series, turns out to have a couple of twists I have never before encountered, so proved to be very interesting. Frieda is an unusual heroine, a cold, analytical person who roams the streets of London at night because of insomnia. I think it would be well worth it to continue reading books in this series.

Day 259: The Greatcoat

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Cover for The GreatcoatI am not familiar with Helen Dunmore, but I looked for this book after reading a review of it on another blog citing it as a good ghost story.

At first I was inclined to dislike it. Isabel Carey is a new wife in 1952, married to a young doctor in a small village in Yorkshire. Isabel is a poorly trained housewife who spends her time disliking her new home in the bottom floor of the landlady’s house and feeling as if everyone is looking at her. She especially dislikes the landlady, Mrs. Atkinson, who paces back and forth on the floor above, sometimes all night.

Unable to get warm in the dank little house, one night she searches through a cupboard and finds an officer’s wool greatcoat, which she uses as an additional bedcover. The next night a strange man dressed as a World War II officer comes and taps on her window.

Soon the officer, Alec, begins coming to visit her and by his behavior shows that he thinks they are lovers. She knows almost immediately that he is a ghost but seems to passively accept their relationship. Who the soldier’s actual lover was should be almost immediately apparent, but Isabel doesn’t seem to guess.

At this point, I was extremely annoyed with the novel, believing I was supposed to find all this romantic when all I could think about was Philip, Isabel’s poor, hard-working husband, who only treats her kindly. The only negative thing about his character is his desire to protect Isabel from everything, and I believe that attitude was typical of the times. I also thought Isabel is a spoiled little brat who does little but complain and thinks nothing of launching into an affair with another man, ghost or not.

Eventually, though, the novel takes a more sinister turn, which is more to my taste. My final overall impression was ambivalence.

By the way, the Amazon write-up of this book (probably taken from the publishers) compares Dunmore as a historical novelist to Tolstoy and Emily Brontë. Aside from the oddness of an implicit comparison between those two writers, this is a gross overstatement of Dunmore’s abilities. What Dunmore has written is a slight, moderately entertaining novel that cannot be compared to the work of the other writers.

Day 258: Busman’s Honeymoon

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Cover for Busman's HoneymoonI have always thought that, with a few exceptions, the arrival of Harriet Vane into the Lord Peter Wimsey series pretty much ruined it. Some of those mysteries are not so bad, and Have His Carcase (wherein Lord Peter meets Harriet) and Gaudy Night (wherein Harriet solves a mystery on her own) are very good, but Busman’s Honeymoon is just too sappy. It is hard to know if Peter and Harriet’s marriage is Sayers’ idea of an ideal relationship or a reflection of some relationship she actually had, but I find that Lord Peter’s galumphing happiness contrasts strangely with Harriet’s odd undertones.

Lord Peter and Harriet are married and travel for their honeymoon to a house they bought in the country. But when they arrive, they find the house is not ready for them and the previous owner, Mr. Noakes, is nowhere to be found–until next morning when Bunter finds him dead in the basement. In the meantime, the servants have been cleaning, and all the clues are gone.

One positive point for the novel is that the Dowager Duchess shows up, a favorite character. We also get a little more background on the relationship between Wimsey and Bunter.

I guess this isn’t the best selection for Valentine’s Day, since I’m criticizing it for sappiness, but if you have different tastes than mine, you might like it. I see that the reviewers on Amazon are remarking at how romantic it is. And also commenting on the subtle humor. Well, I didn’t find it so subtle.

Day 256: The Truth-Teller’s Lie

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Cover for The Truth-Teller's LieIn The Truth-Teller’s Lie, Sophie Hannah has written another perplexing, dark tale. (Caution, book buyers: as with some other of Hannah’s book, this one was previously published under another title–Hurting Distance.)

Naomi Jenkins has a secret she has never told anyone–that a few years ago she was viciously raped. Lately, she has been having an affair with a married man, Robert Haworth. When he doesn’t turn up for their weekly meeting, she is convinced that something has happened to him, but she can’t get Detectives Charlie Zailer and Simon Waterhouse to do more than ask his wife about him. So, she decides to tell a bizarre lie–that Robert was the man who raped her.

When Simon searches Robert’s house, he finds him lying bleeding on the bed and his wife Juliet behaving strangely. Juliet refuses to tell what happened. As the police investigate, they begin to think that there is a serial rapist abducting women and raping them in front of an audience and that there is some connection between these incidents and the attack on Robert.

As usual in a Sophie Hannah novel, everyone is a bit strange. Even the innocent parties seem to be quite batty, and the police have their own, very odd problems. But her novels are dark and complex, and that’s what I like about them.