The Last Hours by Minette Walters

First Line: The summer heat was sucking the life from Develish.

When the Black Death entered England through a port in Dorsetshire in June 1348, no one could possibly know what was going to happen. No other sickness had ever spread or killed so quickly. People began to believe that the plague was a punishment for wickedness, but Lady Anne of Develish had her own ideas. Being both literate and knowledgeable, the convent-educated Lady Anne is a rare woman.

With her brute of a husband visiting another estate when news of the plague reaches her, she makes the decision to bring her serfs inside the safety of the moat and then refuses entry to anyone else-- including her husband. Her decision has made enemies of both her daughter and her steward, but Lady Anne has the full support of her serfs-- until food stocks run low. Someone must cross the moat and brave the outside world if the people of Develish are going to survive. But who will be the ones chosen to go, and what will they find?

Minette Walters' The Last Hours had me so firmly in its grip that if I'd looked up from the book to see a rat, I think I would have called in an airstrike just in case the loathsome rodent was carrying the plague. The first part of the book is a nailbiter as Lady Anne and her serfs make their preparations and then fight off the repeated attempts of those wanting inside the manor. Then the action settles down into two main storylines: Lady Anne and the serfs trying to stay alive and repel all boarders, and the serf Thaddeus and five teenage boys who go out into the world to find food and other survivors.

At over five hundred pages, this is a big book, but the story moves quickly and does not bog down. This is helped mainly by the fact that Walters has populated her book with so many strong characters. There's an entire mystery surrounding Lady Anne's daughter Eleanor, who's been so spoiled by her father that she reeks. If her mother says it's daylight, Eleanor will take an oath on the Bible that it's night. I think the only thing preventing the other characters from locking Eleanor down in the dungeon is the fact that they don't have one. As written by Walters, Eleanor is the one character to make your blood pressure climb into dangerous territory. There are several other characters just as memorable as Eleanor (like her mother Anne), so shame on me for spending so much time on the little wench, but I'll let you discover the others for yourselves.

Walters shows you both Lady Anne's enlightened way of thinking and the beliefs and attitudes of the other people in southern England. It reminded me of some facts that I'd forgotten. (Such as the subject of cats. Cats would have been excellent creatures to have around since they would've killed the rats that were largely responsible for carrying the plague, but at that time cats were believed to be familiars of the Devil and most of them were killed.)

As the action progresses, we start to see how the world is going to change, and by the end of The Last Hours, I found myself looking forward to how Walters is going to continue her story. If you enjoy historical fiction with a nice little mystery wrapped inside, this is definitely the book for you.

The Last Hours by Minette Walters

ISBN:  9780778369318

Mira Books © 2018

Hardcover, 544 pages

Historical Fiction, #1 in a planned series

Rating: A

Source: the publisher


 

The Scribe of Siena by Melodie Winawer

First Line: The problem with being a neurosurgeon is that when the telephone rings, you have to answer it.

Neurosurgeon Beatrice Trovato's deep empathy for her patients has exhausted her. When her beloved brother passes away, she finds herself traveling to Siena, Italy, to settle his estate. Now she not only needs to rest, she also needs to grieve.

As Beatrice begins going through her brother's papers, she finds evidence of a 700-year-old conspiracy to bring ruin to Siena. She uncovers the journal and paintings of fourteenth-century artist Gabriele Accorsi, and when she finds a startling image of her own face in one of his paintings, she is suddenly transported to the year 1347 in a Siena that's soon to be decimated by the Plague. She meets Accorsi, and the longer she knows him and the more she learns about the city, she finds herself falling in love with both. But Siena has a deadly and inevitable date, and Beatrice is going to have to decide in which century she belongs.

I have soft spots in my heart for well-written books about time travel and the Plague. I know they're rather odd topics, but there you are. It's been a long time since I've read a serious time travel novel, and when I heard about Melodie Winawer's The Scribe of Siena, I knew I wanted to read it. Although I did find a couple of minor problems with it, I did enjoy being transported back to medieval Tuscany.

Through watching how Beatrice is with her patients, readers can immediately like her and care what happens to her. That feeling is further cemented when Winawer tells us of the wonderful relationship she had with her brother.  And when she suddenly finds herself in Siena, she doesn't blend seamlessly into the woodwork. No, she gets in trouble for the way she's dressed (she doesn't have the right undergarments for the dress she stole from some poor woman's laundry basket). But she does get a break or two so she can scout around and try to figure out how to get back to the right time period.

Winawer brings medieval Siena to life while she roused my interest in a couple of things. Why was Siena so much harder hit by the Plague than all the other cities in Italy? Was there really an inter-city rivalry between Siena and Florence? That's one of the best things about well-written time travel books: they can jumpstart your curiosity and have you learning all sorts of things.

Earlier, I mentioned finding a couple of problems with The Scribe of Siena. One was that I thought the storyline could've used a slightly larger injection of the Plague to increase tension and suspense. The second was that the book seemed to run out of gas in the last hundred pages. However, this is a debut novel and an extremely enjoyable one at that. Melodie Winawer is an author to watch.

The Scribe of Siena by Melodie Winawer

eISBN: 9781501152276

Touchstone Books © 2017

 eBook, 454 pages

Historical Fiction, Standalone

Rating: B+

Source: Purchased from Amazon.

The Butcher Bird by S.D. Sykes

First Line: It was the tail end of the morning when the charges were laid before me and I would tell you I was tempted to laugh at first, for the story was nonsense.

Young Oswald de Lacy has barely begun to recover from the events in Plague Land, and he certainly hasn't had time to feel more comfortable in his new role as Lord of Somershill Manor when babies begin to disappear and the legend of the Butcher Bird surfaces.

A newborn baby is found impaled on a thorn bush, and villagers report sightings of a huge creature in the sky. A grief-stricken man who lost his family to the plague is held accountable for calling the creature down upon the village, and Oswald has his hands full trying to keep the man alive while he investigates. It should come as no surprise that he gets absolutely no help from any of his men or his scheming sister (who's too busy neglecting her stepdaughters and fawning over her own newborn) or his mother, who seems intent upon poisoning everyone at Somershill with the foul concoctions dreamed up by her personal physician.

Few writers can put you right in the middle of medieval England in all its stench and glory like S.D. Sykes. The Butcher Bird is the perfect follow-up to Plague Land, although Sykes provides enough backstory that newcomers don't really need to read the first book. (If you're a fan of the period, read it anyway!)

Dare I say it, but the death of a baby seems a welcome distraction to Oswald de Lacy. Barely nineteen, he was never meant to be lord of the manor. Instead he was sent to a monastery at the age of seven to lead the religious life until his father and two brothers died of the plague. Now Oswald finds himself thrust into a job he has no training or aptitude for-- and at a time when the whole world is changing. Although the work load remains the same, there are so few peasants left to do it that they are realizing that they can demand higher wages. Naturally the nobility passes a law to prevent that, and Oswald finds himself caught in the middle. He wants to pay his people more money, but he's afraid of the spies who are roaming the countryside to check up on everyone.

As Oswald begins to investigate the baby's death, he sees that-- once again-- fear + ignorance = hatred. Not only do his villagers not want to work for him, they have no intentions of being swayed from their belief in the Butcher Bird. As he struggles to find clues, we are taken on an up-close-and-personal tour of village life immediately following the ravages of the plague. It is fascinating, revolting, funny, and heartbreaking-- and Sykes makes us see and feel it all.

I would imagine that some readers will find Oswald too weak to be the main character. I don't. It's his weakness that makes him perfect for the role. So what if he's not been trained for his role in life? So what if he doesn't seem to have any real aptitude for it? He is an intelligent young man who genuinely wants to do good, and he's taken over Somershill Manor at the precise time that the old world is changing. He's also a teenage boy filled with raging hormones and a fascination with himself. At the end of The Butcher Bird, one of the villagers looks Oswald right in the eye and says, "There is a butcher bird in Somershill." What I cannot wait to see is how Oswald assimilates that statement, and yes, that means I'm eagerly awaiting book number three.

In this second book I found the mystery rather easily solved, especially if one uses the deductive powers of one's heart over one's mind. However, this is such a wonderful evocation of time and place that I can easily overlook something like that. (I do wish I could overlook de Lacy's mother and sister as easily, although I know that they represent the whining, complaining Chorus of Things Past.) Oswald has reached a turning point at the end of this book, and I want to see what he does next.

It's going to be a long, long wait for book number three....
   

The Butcher Bird by S.D. Sykes

ISBN: 9781444785814

Hodder and Stoughton © 2015

Hardcover, 350 pages

Historical Mystery, #2 Oswald de Lacey mystery

Rating: A

Source: Purchased from The Poisoned Pen.  


 

Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas

Title: Have Mercy on Us All
Author: Fred Vargas
ISBN: 1843431092
Translated by: David Bellos
Publisher: The Harvill Press, 2003
Paperback, 321 pages
Genre: Police Procedural, #3 Commissaire Adamsberg mystery
Rating: B+
Source: Purchased from Bookcloseouts.

First Line: When manie wormes breede of putrefaction of the earth: toade stooles and rotten herbes abound: The fruites and beastes of the earth are unsavoury: The wine becomes muddie: manie birds and beastes flye from that place....

In a small Parisian neighborhood the age-old tradition of the town crier still goes on. The self-appointed crier, Joss Le Guern, reads out the daily news, bits of gossip, the weather forecast, items for sale... and ominous messages in strange language that are paid for and placed in Le Guern's message box by an anonymous source-- messages that seem to warn of an impending plague.

Concerned, Le Guern brings the messages to the attention of Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg and his right-hand man, Adrien Danglard. When several apartment buildings have their doors painted with the ancient symbol to ward off plague, Adamsberg knows there is a connection. Then a flea-bitten corpse with plague-like symptoms is found, and the Commissaire is under pressure to solve the case and restore calm to a frightened city.

Once again Vargas has worked her magic. She's created a tiny neighborhood in Paris populated with wonderful characters and a true feeling of community. There is more to the plot than first meets the eye as well. At first seen as a straight-forward mystery involving the bubonic plague, Vargas slowly includes snippets of evidence and tiny clues that make the reader wonder if there's not something more to the plot. This is Vargas, so of course there's more to it than the plague!

Vargas is so skilled at plotting that I was convinced that Adamsberg was after the wrong villain. But-- like twisting the barrel of a kaleidoscope-- the facts kept shifting in and out of focus, regrouping themselves into different patterns, and I slowly began to realize what was going on.

As ever, Adamsberg is the master chef of the book. Yes, he has his men gather all the clues, follow the chain of evidence, turn everything over to the pathologists and other fact-finders, but he relies on his thought processes. All the evidence, all the interviews, all the random impressions are like the ingredients in a recipe. It's up to Adamsberg to put everything together and add the spice of his intuition to come up with a memorable dish. If you're in the mood for a savory meal, I heartily recommend a Commissaire Adamsberg book by Fred Vargas! If you're new to these books and are wondering whether you should start at the beginning of the series, it's really not necessary. Have Mercy on Us All stands alone quite well.

Have Mercy on Us All at Amazon.

Have Mercy on Us All at The Book Depository.

Have Mercy on Us All at Your Favorite Indie Bookseller.

 

Company of Liars by Karen Maitland

Title: Company of Liars
Author: Karen Maitland
ISBN: 9780440244424, Delta Trade Paperbacks, 2009
Genre: Historical Mystery
Rating: A+

First Line: "So that's settled, then; we bury her alive in the iron bridle."

The year is 1348. Camelot, hideously scarred peddler of religious relics and hope, is in Kilmington for the Midsummer Fair when he learns that plague has reached the port cities of England. All he can think of is heading north to safety. Seemingly within the blink of an eye, eight other people have joined with Camelot in order to escape death: a young married couple, two minstrels, a one-armed man, a serving woman, a showman with a wagon filled with curiosities for exhibit, and a strange albino girl child.

The weather forecast is simple: rain, rain, nothing but endless rain. Food and shelter are scarce. The further they travel, the more they hear of other ports closing due to the plague-- and then the dreaded scourge begins moving inland.

The various personalities within the group begin to chafe, but they know they're stronger as a group than as individuals:

The truth was, though none of us admitted as much, we had begun to depend on each other to survive. We shared all our food and ale, which we bought with the little each of us earned from the villages we trundled through. We made makeshift shelters when we couldn't find an inn or a barn, and together helped to gather fodder for the horse.

As their journey continues, strange things begin to happen, and one by one members of the group begin to die. Each member of the group has a secret, and they are all beginning to learn that what they don't know about the others may very well kill them.

The further into this book I read, the more I wanted to shut everything else out until I'd gobbled up every last word. There's something eminently satisfying about a road trip taken with people who cannot be trusted. (At least from the reader's standpoint!) With the reasonable voice of Camelot as narrator, I began to observe the others more closely in an attempt to ferret out their secrets.

To read Company of Liars is to be immersed in another place, another time, another culture in which the very weather plays an important role in how each hour of every day is negotiated:

The rains still fell; the water continued to rise in hollows and lakes. The forests, meadows, and marshes absorbed the rain until the ground oozed water like a weeping sore....

Once, half submerged in a sodden field, we saw the statue of Saint Florian, his face battered, his millstone tied around his neck. Since their saint was unable to protect them from the rains, the parishioners had stripped his statue of his scarlet cloak and golden halo, beaten him, and cast him out to face the elements.

Some readers may find the torrential rains, the inexorable advance of the plague, and an almost total lack of trust to be much too grim. I didn't. As I turned the pages, I kept hearing mud squelch between my toes, wet strands of hair refused to stay out of my eyes, and a constant smell of wet wool surrounded me. The colder and the wetter and the more miserable I felt, I began to react to each new village, each stranger, each bend in the road with increasing suspicion. My mind was, indeed, in fourteenth century England.

Few writers can get into my head to such an extent as Karen Maitland did in Company of Liars. If only I could get the smell of wet sheep out of my nose, I'd thank her. As it is, I look forward to reading her other books with great pleasure.

[Source: Christmas gift from my husband.]