The fallout from a previous exploit comes back to haunt Queen Elizabeth’s half sister.
Mistress Ursula Stannard, who’d like to lead a quiet life caring for her estates and raising her son, Harry, is disturbed by a visit from Sir Robert Dudley, who tells her that he’s just sold neighboring Knoll House to widower Giles Frost, a Catholic merchant. When Ursula receives a message from Walsingham, the queen’s spymaster, she knows something unpleasant is coming her way. Before she can answer his summons, her servant Roger Brockley, her partner in many a dangerous adventure, finds his son, Philip Sandley, shot dead by a crossbow. Although Philip had been involved in the kidnapping of Harry (The Reluctant Assassin, 2018), Brockley grieves his only child and vows to find his killers. When Ursula travels to Greenwich Palace, Walsingham asks what seems like a small favor: for her to go to Knoll House with her companion, expert needlewoman Sybil Jester, and teach her new neighbor Frost’s twin daughters, Joyce and Jayne, to embroider while dropping false information about the British fleet that Frost will pass on to the Spanish. But first she must take up the problem of a stained glass window in the local church that is so gruesome that it disturbs children and parishioners alike. She hires Master Julius Stagg, a designer and creator of stained glass, to replace the window, which someone’s just broken. On a visit to the studio he shows her a magnificent chest that holds a stunning silver salt cellar he’s giving his niece Eleanor as a part of her wedding dowry. Soon thereafter, Stagg and a tearful Eleanor beg her to search for the chest, which they claim has been stolen and hidden at Knoll House. Despite her misgivings and the advice of her friends, Ursula agrees—a mistake that will put her and Brockley in far worse peril than some of her most harrowing tasks for the queen.
More cerebral than many of Ursula’s prior escapades but still an authentic Elizabethan cliffhanger.Pub Date: June 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78029-113-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | HISTORICAL MYSTERY
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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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