Tag: historical fiction

Day 403: The Town

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Cover for The TownThe Town is the second of Faulkner’s “Snopes” novels about the rise to power of Flem Snopes in Jefferson, Mississippi. Written in a style that is remindful of a bunch of old Southern men sitting on the porch swapping stories, it is narrated by three different alternating voices. As a pioneer in novels with multiple narrators, Faulkner is a master.

One of the narrators is a character we met already in The Hamlet, V. K. Ratliff, the itinerant sewing machine salesman who is most knowledgeable about Snopes’ true character, having been deeply scorched by him. Ratliff enlists the Jefferson city attorney, Gavin Stevens, in his observations of Snopes. The third narrator is Charles Mallison, Stevens’ nephew, who tells us himself that he wasn’t even alive during the times of his first tales but was told the stories by his cousin Gowan.

The novel covers the events of nearly 20 years, from the arrival of the Snopes family in Jefferson to the events shortly following the death of Flem’s wife Eula. Although some of the events are tragic, the tone of The Town is more comic than that of The Hamlet, perhaps because the lives of the folks in Jefferson are not as grim as those of the poor sharecroppers in the first novel.

The novel focuses first on the young Gavin’s infatuation with Eula Snopes. Rumor has it that Snopes’ appointment as power-plant supervisor–highlighted by his attempted theft of all the plant’s brass fixtures accompanied by an effort to frame the plant’s two black firemen for the theft–is in return for him closing his eyes to his wife Eula’s affair with Manfred de Spain, the town’s mayor. Young Gavin, newly returned from university at the time, is incensed by this rumor and determined to protect Mrs. Snopes’ reputation. Later, as Eula’s daughter Linda grows up, Gavin tries to save her from “Snopesism” by helping educate her and trying to get her a place in an eastern university.

These two novels are fascinating because of Faulkner’s ability to make central a character who barely has a line of dialogue in either book. He effectively makes Snopes the major presence in the novels by having the other characters observe the results of his actions while endlessly speculating about what he actually does and why he does it. As always with Faulkner, the prose is beautiful.

Day 402: Dust and Shadow

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Cover for Dust and ShadowIn Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson, Lyndsay Faye combines a great deal of research into the Jack the Ripper killings in 1888 with a vast knowledge of Sherlock Holmes literature to offer an entertaining solution to the crimes. The novel begins nearly 50 years after the events, when Dr. Watson places his narrative of the murders into a safety deposit box on the eve of war.

Inspector Lestrade comes to consult Holmes after the second murder, when police begin to realize the two deaths may be linked. Holmes immediately begins pursuing his usual means of detection–inspecting the body and the scenes of the crimes, trying to find out where the victims were last sighted, questioning the victims’ friends–and he very quickly figures out that another murder is related. He even hires an alert young prostitute, Mary Ann Monk, to make her own enquiries and observations after she identifies the body of her friend, Mrs. Nichols. However, he is soon frustrated by his lack of progress. The only lead Holmes has come across is the story of an elusive sailor, being sought by a friend who thinks he may have been involved in the first murder, that of Mrs. Nichols.

Soon Holmes and Watson have something else to worry about, for a member of the press is printing details of the crimes unknown to but a few. He has been alleging that Holmes himself may be the murderer.

Faye’s novel is atmospheric and absorbing. Its greatest accomplishment, though, is in successfully capturing the narrative style of Doctor Watson, making us believe that this could be a Holmes story. Although I was about 100 pages ahead of Holmes in solving the murder (which would never happen in a real Holmes story), I still found the solution ingenious as well as the reason why the crimes are recorded in history as unsolved (when, of course, Holmes solved them). This novel is a very good first effort. I have Faye’s next book awaiting me in my pile.

Day 401: Literary Wives: Ahab’s Wife Or, The Star-Gazer

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Cover for Ahab's WifeToday I am doing something a little different–participating in a virtual book-discussion group with Literary Wives. Literary Wives is a group of bloggers who are wives and are reading books about how wives are depicted in fiction. Toward the end of my normal review of this month’s choice, I will answer some specific questions that appear in every Literary Wives review. Be sure to check out the other reviews by Audra of Unabridged Chick, Ariel of One Little Library, Emily of The Bookshelf of Emily J., Carolyn of Rosemary and Reading Glasses, Cecilia of Only You, and Lynn of Smoke and Mirrors.

I have quite got to like what appears to be a newish fashion of rewriting works of fiction from a different viewpoint. Although it has produced some mediocre results, it has also produced some gems, a few of which are Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, The Solitary House by Lynn Shepherd, and now, Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund.

I was somewhat put off by Naslund’s writing style in her most recent novel, The Fountain of St. James Court; however, it is imminently suited to her most well-known novel, this one, which is a reworking of Moby Dick. This novel is truly an adventure. It begins with a brief look forward to Una Spenser’s delivery alone in a cabin in the wilds of Kentucky of Ahab’s child, which does not live long, and the subsequent discovery that her mother has died in the snow while going for help. If this isn’t enough going on, while she is in labor, Una also has an encounter with bounty hunters looking for an escaped slave. Later, she helps the slave girl escape.

After this glimpse ahead in time, the novel returns to take a relatively straightforward path, beginning with twelve-year-old Una’s banishment from this same cabin in Kentucky. Una has faced some abuse at the hands of her father because of a difference in religious beliefs, so her mother sends her to her Aunt Agatha and Uncle Jonathan, where they live on a lighthouse island off Massachusetts. So begins Una’s fascination with the sea.

Although not every 19th century woman would think life with a loving, thoughtful, intellectually curious family confining, Una eventually finds it so, when she is sixteen. Her feelings are complicated by the arrival of two young men who come to prepare for the installation of a new light for the lighthouse. They are best friends Giles Bonebright and Kit Sparrow. Una knows she likes them both but is not at first sure which one she likes best. This fateful meeting is to affect the rest of Una’s life.

But I am writing nothing here that reflects how unusual this novel is. First, it documents the extraordinary life of an extremely uncommon character. If some of the other characters are not so fully drawn, you really feel as if you know Una. Next, in its occasional long asides and fits of oratory, it is a fitting companion to Moby Dick, with its dissertations on bits of whaling gear and its exhortations by Ahab. If any woman is a match for Ahab, Una is. Finally, its language and ideas are lyrical and soaring, as Una grows intellectually, meets her own life full on, and becomes acquainted with historical figures from her time and place.

If I have a caveat, it is that I feel the exceptional Una would have had more problems of acceptance in the actual 19th century American setting. In keeping with a theme about the enjoyment of life, not only does Una throw off debillitating experiences with little trouble or regret, but she also finds warm friends and acceptance everywhere she goes. It would give away too many plot points to discuss why I find this unlikely.

For Literary Wives: What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?Literary Wives logo

This novel does not draw on a conventional idea of a wife, particularly for the time it is set. For Una, being a wife seems to mean giving unstinting loyalty up to a point, but this loyalty can vanish fairly quickly if the relationship becomes disrespectful, and Una’s natural ebulliance takes her over some terrible difficulties with relative (and perhaps unlikely) ease.

I don’t think Una lets the conventional notions of wifehood affect her at all. She just does what she wants and what she thinks is right, but her ideas of right are different from other people’s. For her, a husband seems to be the more modern idea of a partner. Certainly, mutual respect, sexual attraction, and love enter into this equation but not so much the typical 19th century idea of duty.

In what way does this woman define “wife”–or in what way is she defined by “wife”?

I don’t think Una is defined by “wife” at all. I think “person” is more what Naslund is interested in. In a review of this book, it was referred to as a feminist, earth mother, reinterpretation of Moby Dick. I don’t see the earth mother so much, but the feminism is certainly there. “What was a promise? A way to enslave the future to the past,” Una thinks at one point.

Day 398: The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton

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Cover for The Strange Fate of Kitty EastonIf you prefer a book to leap immediately into action, this is probably not the mystery for you. The second in a series, it starts slowly, with Speller taking the time to develop the setting and characters.

Laurence Bartram is a young man damaged by World War I, during which his wife and child died and he was injured. Laurence is an expert on church architecture, and he is happy to be summoned to the estate of Easton Deadall by his friend, William Bolitho. William wants him to look over  a small but unusual church, for which William is designing and installing a window.

Laurence is soon pulled into the affairs of the Eastons, a family that is haunted by the war, but moreso by the disappearance in 1911 of the young daughter of Digby Easton, the oldest of the three Easton brothers. Digby died during the war, but Kitty still obsesses her mother Lydia, an invalid who sometimes speaks of her as if she is alive.

The middle Easton son, Julian, has been doing his best with the estate, which Laurence finds beautiful but slightly crumbling, while Lydia’s sister Frances takes care of her. Laurence finds the subject of Kitty lurking behind every conversation and wonders if they will discover her body in the course of their renovations. Soon, the third Easton brother, Patrick, returns to Easton Deadall after an absence of years, first at Oxford and then on an archaeological dig in Greece. It becomes obvious that there is tension between him and Julian.

The family decides to make up a party to visit the Empire Exhibition. William, who was left wheelchair bound by the war, does not feel he can handle it, and Lydia is too ill, but the rest of the family goes. The expedition includes Eleanor, William’s wife, and Laurence. They also bring along David, the estate’s man of all work, and the teenage maid Maggie to help care for William and Eleanor’s young son Nicholas. At the exhibition, Maggie and Nicholas go missing, and although the others find Nicholas, Maggie is nowhere to be seen.

Distressed by Maggie’s disappearance, which can’t but echo the earlier one of Kitty, the family begins falling apart and secrets emerge, especially about the charismatic Digby and his relationships to his family and to his troops during the war. A few days after the disastrous outing, Laurence and David are clearing an area in the church to prepare for the installation of William’s window when they discover a trap door in the floor under the altar. When they open it, they find the body of a woman. The police are able to quickly ascertain that the body is of a woman too old to be Maggie, but then, who can it be? Could it even be Kitty, grown up and returned from wherever she has been?

Laurence does not exactly detect so much as look into a few things the others haven’t thought of, and he eventually unearths a tangle of secrets. Although the novel takes awhile to get going, I soon found myself unable to put it down. It slowly and skillfully builds to suspense. I found it well worth my patience.

Day 397: Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle

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Cover for SylvesterOn occasion, I reread a few of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances, which have been some of my favorite reading for many years. Just recently, I reread Sylvester, which in some editions is titled Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle.

The extremely eligible bachelor Sylvester, Duke of Salford, has decided to take a wife. His only difficulty is in deciding which of five eligible girls to marry. When his beloved mama mentions that she and her best friend made a plan for their children to marry many years before, he decides to go inspect the girl, his godmother’s granddaughter, to see if he might like her. Although he is warm and thoughtful to those he cares for, since his twin brother’s death, he has been aloof to others and comes off as haughty.

Sylvester’s visit is disguised as a hunting party, but Phoebe Marlow is informed by her detestable stepmother that the duke is coming to make her an offer. Unfortunately, Phoebe has already met Sylvester and took such a dislike to him that she used him as the villain in a novel she wrote. That novel is going to be published, despite all expectation. Normally, she would not expect him to recognize himself in a silly gothic romance that pokes fun at various society figures, but for the mention of Sylvester’s very distinctive eyebrows.

Fearful of her stepmother’s pressure and not understanding that Sylvester has no intention of proposing, Phoebe talks her childhood friend Tom into escorting her to her grandmother’s house. However, an accident and a snowstorm strand her and Tom with Sylvester in a small country inn.

After Phoebe gets to know and like Sylvester, she is horrified to find out that he has a nephew, since in her silly romance his character is a wicked uncle who wants to steal his nephew’s fortune. Another horror lurks, because Phoebe’s book proves to be a smashing success, much read by society members, who are all trying to identify their friends. Since Phoebe has never brought herself to admit to Sylvester that she wrote a book, she soon fears that people will find out she is the author.

Heyer creates delightful, engaging characters and puts them into silly and unbelievable situations, which is part of the pleasure of reading her novels. They are very well written, with entertaining and sparkling dialogue and a complete understanding of the customs, dress, and speech of the period. If you decide to read Sylvester, get ready for some fun. Many of Heyer’s novels have been re-released in the past few years, so they should not be hard to find.

Day 394: The Fountain of St. James Court or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman

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Cover for The Fountain of St. James CourtI received this book in a First Reads giveaway from Goodreads. I haven’t read Naslund before, so I am not sure whether she adapted her writing style for this novel, but it took me awhile to accustom myself to it. She follows the activities of two artists, one Kathryn Callaghan, a fictional older writer in the current time, and the other a once-living person, Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, a painter known especially for her portraits of Marie Antoinette.

The modern-day story begins at midnight next to a fountain of Venus in a neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky. Kathryn, or Ryn, is taking her newly finished manuscript to her friend Leslie’s door because she can’t wait to deliver it.

The novel’s structure is a book within a book. Chapters following one day in Ryn’s life are interleaved with chapters covering the whole of Vigée-Le Brun’s life, which are from Ryn’s book. Both stories are about the theme of what it means to be an artist and what you must give up of your personal life to pursue your profession. The novel is said to be a deliberate variation on Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, but it has been so long since I’ve read it that I cannot comment on that.

This novel is contemplative, especially in the modern-day narrative, but the interleaving of stories in such short chapters slows down the pace too much. It literally takes until page 34 for Ryn to walk across the street and deliver the manuscript. Even with some chapters from the 18th century interleaved, the pace is frustrating. I found myself thinking, when is this woman going to make it across the street?

I found the story of Vigée-Le Brun’s life more compelling than the modern-day story, during which we follow Ryn’s every thought. She is an excitable, emotional woman who contemplates everything she looks at and repeatedly broods over the same things. We read about the russet and yellow fall colors or the appearance of the fountain many times. Nothing much happens all day until a late-night confrontation that seems artificially created to provide some tension.

I did not feel, however, that the two women, Ryn and Vigée-Le Brun, were two different people–they seemed to be the same person in different time periods. Vigée-Le Brun is slightly less emotionally excitable than Ryn, but their observations of the world around them, their attention to color and the details of design and structure, are very similar. Vigée-Le Brun’s narrative style, in first person where Ryn’s is in third person, is a little more formal as befitting an earlier age, but conversations in this story often sound stilted, and her first conversation with Marie Antoinette is positively sycophantic.

Naslund’s writing style, although sometimes vibrant and lyrical, often seems affected, particularly in the modern-day story. The copy I read was an advanced reader’s edition and it had quite a few typos, which I assume will be corrected. I was not quite as sure of some self-consciously unusual phrases, whether they were stylistic choices rather than errors. Naslund’s writing style tends to the unusual, to be sure, but I stumbled over some of these phrases. The only one I wrote down was an instance where some characters “made quick chat.”

I wanted to like this novel more than I did. I think the theme of women and art is worth exploring, although I’m not sure how much this novel actually explored this issue, despite its obvious intentions. I am actually curious about the alleged feminist leanings of Naslund and their effect on this book. Vigée-Le Brun has to put up with her father and then husband appropriating all her money and, in her husband’s case, only giving her a bit of it back as an allowance. When they divorce, he gets almost everything. Yet, she is determined not to let it bother her. I am not sure whether that is a feminist viewpoint or not.

However, the characters in this novel certainly reflect the “gift for pleasure” noted in reviews of Ahab’s Wife (which I am currently reading). The women go on pursuing their lives and dreams without much heed to their menfolk, they have cordial relations with those around them, they delight in color and the fineness of life. Their regrets and sorrows mostly focus on their children.

One thing that surprised me about the historical story was that Vigée-Le Brun hardly seemed to notice the causes of the French revolution or the revolution itself. There is one scene where a woman confronts her on the street and another where she grieves for the fate of so many. That’s about it.

Conversely, it is hard to believe that she would be shocked to the core by seeing a model of internal organs, as artists had been studying the body for hundreds of years. I do not know how much of this novel actually reflects Vigée-Le Brun’s true thinking and feeling. The danger when portraying a historical person is that you are imagining who the person really is–you don’t know–and you have no idea if you are doing them justice or injustice.

Day 383: The Hamlet

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Cover for The HamletWhen I got into The Hamlet a bit, I realized that a bastardized version of it had been released as a movie years ago called The Long, Hot Summer. But Paul Newman’s charming rascal is not at all the same animal as his original, Flem Snopes, a despicable man who rises in life using chicanery, cheating, and blackmail to wrest what he can from the poorest of the poor.

The Hamlet is part of a trilogy of novels about the history of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, beginning shortly after Reconstruction. In particular, it is about the rise of Snopes, the son of an impoverished sharecropper. It begins when Jody Varner, the son of Frenchman’s Bend’s most powerful citizen, Will Varner, leases a property to Snopes’s father Ab, suspected of being a barn-burner. Jody thinks he’ll be able to cheat Snopes out of his yearly crop by alluding to his alleged crimes at the appropriate time. But soon he is more inclined to fear that Snopes will burn him out, so he offers Snopes’s son Flem a job as clerk in the Varner store as insurance.

Soon Jody has lost his own position as manager of the store to Flem Snopes and Snopes has apparently taken over Jody’s standing with his own father. Somehow Snopes begins accruing valuable property and gives away many of the jobs in the village, over which Will Varner has control, to Snopes cousins, whether they are capable of doing them or not. Eventually, he makes a deal to marry Will Varner’s young daughter, the voluptuous Eula.

Life among the Frenchman’s Creek sharecroppers is grim, and the story of the rise of this gray, tight-lipped, cold man is told through a limited third-person narration that moves from person to person. This narrative style creates a sort of plural viewpoint of all the village folk and is combined with the intelligent observations of itinerant sewing-machine salesman V.K. Ratliff, who alertly follows Snopes’s maneuvers and understands all his cheats–or so he thinks.

This novel is created from a series of tales, and it is really about how the tales of an area form its history. It is elegantly written, reflecting a formidable intelligence and education, and is sometimes grimly comic. It comments on the decay of the South in the aftermath of the American Civil War and the Reconstruction, as Frenchman’s Bend is a run-down little village built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation. The legend of gold supposedly buried on the grounds of the plantation plays a pivotal part in the story.

Day 378: Cascade

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Cover for CascadeIt would be nice to know how much O’Hara expects us to like Desdemona Hart Spaulding, the heroine of Cascade. Unfortunately, I think we may be thrust too abruptly into Dez’s troubles to get to like her.

A promising artist who has studied in Boston and Paris, Dez has already been forced to leave that life when we meet her. The Great Depression cost her father his fortune, and he had to close down the famous theater he founded in the resort town of Cascade and sell his treasured First Folio of Shakespeare. Dez was forced to withdraw from art school and hastily married her childhood friend Asa Spaulding so that she and her father would have somewhere to live. Her father dies soon after, and she is taken aback to find he has left the theater to Asa.

Still, considering she married a man with little interest in or understanding of her drive to create art, Asa has set aside a bright room in their house for her studio, and she paints for several hours on most days. Asa wants a child, though, and Dez fears that her precious painting time would be taken up with child rearing. She is secretly doing what she can to prevent conception.

Two things soon make her dissatisfied with her life. Her art school friend Abby stops by on her way to a new life in New York, and suddenly everything in the depressed town looks shabby, even the beloved playhouse. Dez has also formed a friendship with a Jewish man named Jacob Solomon, who has taken over his father’s peddlar’s route. Jacob, though, is a gifted artist who plans to sell his father’s inventory and move to New York, hoping for a job with the Works Progress Administration. He meets Dez once a week to discuss art, but after a dispute, Asa asks her to stop meeting Jacob.

Asa is concerned because the town is under threat. Cascade is one of two possible towns that may be flooded to create a reservoir that will supply water to Boston. Asa wants to mobilize an effort to save Cascade, and Dez has the idea to paint a series of postcards showing Cascade in the past and present in an attempt to garner public support for the town. She is able to sell this idea to a prominent national magazine. All the while, however, she is secretly hoping the town will lose and she will have an excuse to move to a large city. The agreement she makes with the magazine and other disastrous decisions cause her to betray her husband, her town, and finally even Jacob.

I think O’Hara wants us to sympathize with Dez in her growing ambition to go to New York and take up a career in art. But some of her actions don’t just show poor judgment; they are despicable. As the plot advances, I feel less and less sympathy for her.

A review from the Boston Globe calls Dez complex and says she doesn’t always make the right choices. I think it’s worse than that; the trouble is really with where she places her priorities. The town is in danger of dying, in the horrible economy many people’s welfares are at risk, but Dez puts her future as an artist first and barely gives the other townspeople a thought, in fact, seems to feel superior to them. She supposedly yearns to reopen her father’s playhouse but doesn’t seem to give it much attention when it is threatened, although she eventually makes a deal that saves it. She has married for selfish reasons and is all too ready to give up on her marriage.

Of course, the principal theme of the novel is how much to give up for art, but in this case, it is not Dez who does the sacrificing. I wish I had liked this novel better. I think that if we’d had a longer time with Dez in her art student life and gotten to know her before she began a series of lies, deceptions, and betrayals, I could have felt more sympathy with her struggle.

Day 374: A Plague of Lies

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Cover for A Plague of LiesA Plague of Lies is the third in the mystery series set in 17th century France and featuring Charles du Luc, a master of rhetoric at the Louis le Grand school in Paris.

Charles is dismayed when he is summoned to escort Père Jouvancy to the court at Versailles to present Madame de Maintenon with the gift of a holy relic. Madame is angry with the Jesuits because the King’s confessor, Père la Chaise, convinced the King not to give her the title of Queen, so the gift is an attempt to regain favor. Although Charles disapproves of what he sees as the Sun King’s constant self-glorification, he must escort Père Jouvancy, an old man who is just recovering from an illness that is raging through Paris.

On their way to Versailles, Charles and Jouvancy encounter Lieutenant-Général de la Reynie, head of the Paris police, whom Charles has assisted on occasion. La Reynie asks Charles to keep an eye on the Prince of Conti while he is there and to listen to what is said about him.

Once at court, though, Père Jouvancy has a relapse, and Charles comes close to witnessing the death of a much-disliked man, the Comte de Fleury. Apparently, he too was ill and running for the latrine when he slipped on the wet floor and fell down the stairs. The rumor is that he was writing a scandalous memoir, and poison is immediately mentioned. When the other members of Charles’ party fall ill, there are more rumors of poison, but all the men seem to just have food poisoning.

De Fleury does appear to have been poisoned, however, and Charles observes several people going in and out of his room, including the Duc du Maine, son of the King. Charles finds himself getting embroiled in the problems of the Duc’s sister, Mademoiselle de Rouen, who is soon to be engaged to the son of the King of Poland and is not happy about it. Charles also observes Conti behaving suspiciously. Next, a gardener is found drowned.

The novel presents us with a convoluted plot but also with a fascinating portrait of the court at Versailles. Rock’s knowledge of the period, even of how the places she describes would have appeared at that time, seems convincingly complete. Her novels are always absorbing.

Day 366: The Pale Blue Eye

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Cover for The Pale Blue EyeGus Landor, a retired New York police detective, is dying, and he writes the account of his last case in The Pale Blue Eye. Gus is a lonely widower who earlier moved up to the mountains near the Hudson Valley with his wife and daughter to help improve his lungs. But his wife died within a year, and his daughter left him soon after. So, Gus lives as a veritable hermit.

On an October morning in 1830, an officer from West Point fetches him. The body of a cadet named Fry was found hanged the night before, presumably a suicide, but during the night his body was stolen and later he was found with his heart removed. Superintendent Thayer and Commander Hitchcock wish to hire Landor to find who stole the heart. Landor is quick to figure out that Fry did not commit suicide but was murdered. A mysterious message clutched in his hand seems to indicate an assignation.

Landor soon realizes that his investigations on the reservation will be sorely hampered without the assistance of an inside man. So, he asks for the help of an unusual cadet he has met who is not in good favor with the academy–Cadet Edgar Allan Poe.

This is a clever novel with a macabre mystery that would have been completely to Poe’s taste. Just when we think everything is figured out, Bayard presents us with a twist. His portrait of the young Poe, bombastic, ridiculously romantic, and fearfully intelligent, is a great pleasure.

I would only fault the novel for a slow-paced middle section, and only because Landor doesn’t seem to be doing anything. Most of the plot is driven forward by Poe’s reports, which begin to dwell on his infatuation with a lovely young woman, Lea, the daughter of the post doctor, who unfortunately suffers from the “falling sickness,” or epilepsy.

Of course, Landor is doing something–he’s deciphering Fry’s diary–but since he doesn’t relate its revelations, his investigation seems to flag, and he barely seems to look into a second death, with a second missing heart. Otherwise, the novel is well written, with well-developed and interesting characters and a surprising ending.