BOOK REVIEW: The Riddle of the Roses by Mary Lancaster

I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

The eighth book in Mary Lancaster’s historical mystery/romance series is now available. The Riddle of the Roses continues the adventures of Constance Silver and Solomon Grey, a Victorian era private investigating team.

In this book, Constance and Solomon are asked to investigate the death of Caterina di Ripoli, a young opera singer. The request is made by Sebastian Kellar, who readers have met in a previous book, a diplomat with a shady background and shadier connection to Constance. He was an old family friend of the singer and he has a strong feeling the death was not natural. He blames the husband, who stands to inherit all her fortune.

However, the singer has a long history of heart disease, and there is no indication that the death was anything but a complication of that disease. Part of the mystery is why Kellar thinks there may have been foul play. The husband’s grief is convincingly sincere and deep.

Constance and Solomon resist taking the case, which appears to have no merit. But the presence of a bouquet of roses in the dead woman’s room, that seem to have appeared out of nowhere on the night of her death, draws them in. As they dig deeper, rather than having no viable suspects, they find too many, one of whom is Kellar.

The Riddle of the Roses is another gripping mystery that kept me guessing until the end. At the same time, it continues to explore the relationship between the (now married) investigating duet. There are also some intriguing love stories developing within the supporting cast.

BOOK REVIEW: The News From Dublin by Colm Tóibín

I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

I don’t read many short story collections (which is what I say whenever I review a short story collection.) However, I’m addicted to Colm Tóibín, so when I saw this collection on Netgalley, The News From Dublin, I had to request it.

Everything Tóibín writes is extraordinary, with deep dives into the characters’ psyches and beautiful prose. There are nine stories in the collection, set in different time periods and different countries. Like all short stories, there are no happy endings and they are much more character driven than plot driven. Tóibín is able to make even unsympathetic characters compelling (The Free Man). I highly recommend the book for the first 8 stories.

The only one that didn’t captivate me was the final story, The Catalan Girls, about a family of Catalan sisters who emigrate to Argentina to make new lives for themselves. They were not close. In fact, they didn’t like one another and their mother only cared for one of them–not the protagonist. That story seemed to drag, maybe in part because it was novella length rather than short story length, but maybe the wandering through life was the point.

Short story fans should not miss The News From Dublin.

BOOK REVIEW: A Shop Girl’s Guide to Wooing a Lord by Shana Galen

I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

Shana Galen has a new series coming out: The Heiress Hunters. Book 1 is A Shop Girl’s Guide to Wooing a Lord.

The heiress hunters are the sons of the Earl of Glenister. When they learn of the family’s impending bankruptcy, and of their parents’ reluctant decision to marry off their fifteen-year-old sister to a significantly older wealthy lord to salvage their estates, the sons decide that one of them will have to marry an heiress instead. Being brothers, they turn it into a competition. Garrett Kildare, the second son, is determined to be the one to save the family. The only problem is, the heiresses he has been introduced to leave him cold.

Tamsin Archer is an impoverished commoner who lives with her twice-widowed mother in a tavern where their labor is exploited by the owner and where Tamsin is beaten by the owner’s wife. If this situation isn’t hopeless enough, Tamsin has two younger step-siblings who were sold to a man named Snoozer who runs a company of chimney sweeps. Tamsin has to turn over the little money she earns in order that they might be fed. She’s trying to save up to buy them back, but the price is forever out of reach. And so, she begins stealing. At an aristocrat’s party, she is caught mid-robbery by Garrett.

Tamsin knows what a kind person he is, because she met him once, years before. He bought violets from her when she was a desperate flower girl. She is even more desperate now. She manages to run off, but Garrett is determined to find her. When he does, and learns her story, he wants to help. 

Unfortunately, Garrett is also sticking to his plan to marry an heiress. He falls for Tamsin, but he can’t marry her. She’s a commoner and she’s poor. Tamsin in turn has been in love with Garrett since her flower girl days, but she also knows the class difference is insurmountable.

Or is it?

This steamy Regency Romance is a fun read that introduces spirited protagonists to root for as well as a host of brothers who will no doubt continue the hunt for heiresses. (And a sister who’ll get her own story, I hope!)

BOOK REVIEW: Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt

I’ve fallen way behind on my reading for two main reasons. First, I’m working on my next novel and writing to a deadline. Second, the book I was reading was not one to fly through. It’s a biography of Christopher Marlowe. I’ve had a vague interest in Marlowe for a long while, but I only knew of him as someone “Shakespeare-adjacent.” A contemporary of Shakespeare, Marlowe was also a playwright and poet. He was reportedly a spy for Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster. And he died far too young in a barroom brawl, or some such thing. That is a woefully inadequate biography.

What really pulled him from the shadows for me was Allison Epstein’s extraordinary novel, A Tip for the Hangman, which I highly recommend. More recently, I came across this literary biography by Stephen Greenblatt, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival.

This book succeeds best as a literary biography, more so than as a straight biography. The difficulty is that so much of Marlowe’s life story just isn’t known. Particularly when dealing with Marlowe’s early life, but not exclusive to his early days, we are asked to follow along with the author’s speculations and imaginings. And while they are educated, reasonable speculations, I was frustrated in wanting more certainty from a biography, even though I recognize that information is lost in the past.

Greenblatt does a wonderful job of explaining the dangerous times that Marlowe was living in. The Protestant-Catholic suspicions and plots created a highly anxious society with an undercurrent of violence. Marlowe was sucked into the world of espionage on behalf of Queen Elizabeth’s spy-ring. He was murdered in a tavern, the crime officially explained as a quarrel over the bill. All of which makes his life intriguing.

But what he should be remembered for is not the spying, but his extraordinary literary talent. This biography examines in depth his plays and some of his poetry. It interprets them, and Marlowe’s motivations for writing them,  in light of the life he was living. It all sounds plausible, and it is fascinating, but first you have to accept Greenblatt’s speculations about that life and about those motivations.

Marlowe’s life can be summed up as “live fast, die young.” But his life’s work lives on. It especially lives on in the influence he had on contemporary and future writers.

(If you like literary biographies, I highly recommend Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell, which is a biography of John Donne.)