Recent reads

Pirate King, Laurie King
A Crimson Warning, Tasha Alexander
2011

Two new novels in these popular and well-written historical series. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. They share appealing heroines in Mary Russell (Mrs. Sherlock Holmes) and Lady Emily Hargreaves. Both have interesting historical settings and characters.

Pirate is set in the post-WWI British film industry, a story about a film within a film (of Pirates of Penzance) set in Portugal with a real and scary pirate and various other folks. I've enjoyed every one of the revisionist Mary Russell mysteries. They are a cut above - amusing and thought provoking with interesting slice of history with interesting settings and still a hint of the curmudgeonly charm that makes Conan Doyle's Holmes so enduring. Anyway, this one is a bit tedious with its silly film plot and it takes a long time to get to the point. Mary is still appealing, the dialogue is fun, and Portugal/North Africa setting dreamy and scary.

Crimson, the latest in the Lady Emily series, is set in Victorian England. Lady Emily is a bit of classics scholar turned detective and secret agent. I complained about her two previous novels set, respectively, in Turkey and France (http://hitormystery.blogspot.com/2010/01/tears-ofboredom.html and http://hitormystery.blogspot.com/2011/04/mad-bad-and.html).

This latest one has her back in London in her high society life in which she is not entirely comfortable. It's hard to feel too much sympathy with the perfect Lady Emily and her romance novel marriage. Her friends think she's brilliant - only her mother doesn't like her (thank God for this). Red paint is splashed on the houses of those with secrets and all society is afraid - a horrific murder, mysterious downtrodden deaf people, and Ivy (sweet Ivy!) has a secret. And those who dislike Emily must be odious. But I still found things to enjoy - such as glimpses of Victorian society, the British Museum and Library.

So I recommend both with qualifications. Read the early books in these series!

Mad, bad, and...

...Dangerous to Know. Lady Caroline Lamb's famous characterization of Lord Byron has been used a number of times for previous novels and movies like the classic potboiler depicted to the left, a recent novel by Barbara Taylor Bradford, quotes about various people, an album by Hillary Duff, a memorable song in an episode of Angelina Ballerina, biographies of Byron, and so on.... I really foresee Byron will be reborn as a detective soon if he hasn't been already. He did figure large in a recent Stephanie Barron- Jane Austin novel.

Anyway... that is the title of the latest Tasha Alexander http://www.tashaalexander.com/index.html Lady Emily mystery. I loved this series when it started. Alexander is doing something wonderful and fresh with this series in dealing with the mores and lives of Victorian woman intellectuals or those who crave the intellectual life. The first few:  Only to Deceive, A Poisoned Season were brilliant and wonderfully exciting in a lot of ways but I didn't much care for the last one,Tears of Pearl, as I detailed in a previous blog:
http://hitormystery.blogspot.com/2010/01/tears-ofboredom.html.
But I had high hopes for this one.


I did like it, mostly, but did think that it dragged. And once again was light on charm. Emily is again divorced from her English society milieu and friends like Ivy, even her judgmental mother. A bunch of stuff didn't make much sense and Emily does seem both whiny and self-righteous. Her husband Colin keeps saying she's brilliant, which is good, since that's the only way you'd know. That's before he cracks down and doesn't want her to do anything. And his mother, an imperious suffragette shows up and hates Emily. Nobody is very understanding of poor post-Pearl injured Emily and it seemed to take a long time to slog through it all.

One annoying things is the frequent use of the word "beyond" - as in "beyond terrifying," "beyond boring," and so on. It's set in France but little seems French or like France. I guess they all speak so fluently that there is no problem with going back and forth between languages without any acknowledgment. Monet shows up as character to move along the plot but he and his wife don't really come alive as characters not does their famous garden get much attention. Sebastian the thief (the apparant inspiration for Arsene Lupin) and Cecile are a bit amusing but their devotion to Emily seems unwarranted - even strained. The food sounds good (a pear wrapped in pastry sounds really divine) but the setting really lacks the feeling, flavor, and sense of being in France in the late nineteenth century or any other time.

Monet's house in Giverny that Emily visits

I was glad to finally finish it - it seemed take forever but I have to admit the unraveling of whodunit was clever and I never guessed who - at least partly 'cause I didn't care!

It's hard to keep a series fresh and Tasha Alexander is doing a good job of scouting out new locations and there are hints of gender politics and maybe domestic trials to come. I'm sure to read the next one.

Tears of...boredom

Tasha Alexander
http://www.tashaalexander.com/index.html

Tears of Pearl
A Fatal Waltz
A Poisoned Season
And Only to Decieve

Tears of Pearl is the fourth novel in the Emily Ashton Victorian era series. Emily, a scholarly Victorian outcast and widow, has married her sweetheart, Colin Hargreaves, and they are on their honeymoon in Turkey.

In the previous books and especially the first two, Emily is appealing since she is at odds with so many of the mores of her society and with her cold society mother.  Emily makes mistakes and struggles to learn about her dead husband and herself and find her place in the world. In the process she gains a new love and solves crimes beginning with her husband's death. I really enjoyed the first three books in this series. Tasha Alexander had clearly done a lot of research and they were fresh and well-written and interesting.

In Tears of Pearl, Emily has lost much of her appeal. This book was a big disappointment. She is no longer struggling with herself or her society - she is a smug know at all, a representative of British colonialism who goes to a foreign country and provides instruction for the rulers of the country about how to conduct their affairs. This derivative and frankly pretty boring novel reminded me strongly of Elizabeth Peters without the humor or even Anna and the King of Siam with its escape-from-the-harem subplot. Alexander is at great pains to show us Constantinople but it never comes alive as anything more than a backdrop. Her redition of Victorian England was much more convincing. The characters were thin and the dialogue trying. I slogged through it all although by the middle of the book I was tired of it.

One can only hope that Emily will regain her appeal when she goes home. Assuming the next novel is not set in Transylvania, South Africa, or Egypt.