Category Archives: Wales

Review: Relics of the Dead by Ariana Franklin

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Relics of the Dead (also published as Grave Goods in the US) is the second selection for my face to face book club this month (we meet on Sunday) and I’m also counting it as my third book towards the Historical Fiction Challenge. I’ve actually read more than 3 historical books this year but I’ve used those for other challenges.

The book opens in 1154 as an earthquake engulfs Glastonbury Abbey and a dying monk sees people lowering a coffin into a fissure created in the earth. Did the coffin contain the body of the legendary King Arthur, long-thought to be merely sleeping in the nearby hills until his people need him again? Twenty-two years later the monk’s nephew, who was present as his uncle died, shares the information with King Henry II who has just quashed one Welsh rebellion and is desperate to rid himself of the legend of Arthur lying in wait to rise again. There has been a fire at Glastonbury Abbey and Henry orders the coffin to be dug up. He then commands the one person in his kingdom who has the skills to authenticate the bones as Arthur’s. Adelia Aguilar, the doctor who can ‘read bones’, reluctantly agrees to attempt to determine the age of the bones. With her daughter and faithful attendants she travels to Glastonbury, travelling part of the way with Lady Emma Wolvercote and her party who are on their way to lay claim to Lady Emma’s estate. Later, Adelia discovers she did not make it to her destination. Or did she?

As with the previous two books in this series, Relics of the Dead is first and foremost a good old-fashioned adventure full of brave Knights performing feats of derring-do while less noble souls engage in more prosaic acts. The legend of Arthur and Guinevere is woven artfully into the story unfolding around Adelia in the present day and there’s barely a moment for the reader to catch her breath with several action-packed threads playing out at once.

All of this is accompanied by engrossing information about the historical period, so you feel like you’re learning something while being thoroughly entertained. Under her real name (Diana Norman) Franklin has researched and written extensively about Henry II and her affection for the man is evident in this book. His faults are talked about, but Franklin generally tends to highlight his foresight and modern thinking by introducing such things as trial-by-jury and other innovations. Having read three of these books now, I’m beginning to develop my own crush on Henry Plantagenet.

Although some people argue that Adelia is an unbelievable character for her time, Franklin makes a a good case that women in her situation would have had more scope to fend for themselves than the true upper class women that Adelia sometimes mixes with. And even if she is not entirely credible for her time, she’s wonderful: strong, loving, loyal and smart. Her loyal attendants from the previous books, Mansur and Gyltha, are again excellent in their supporting roles and of course the Bishop of St Albans, the father of Adelia’s child, makes another trouble-filled appearance. There are some unforgettable new characters in this tale too, not least of which is the old woman who runs the Pilgrim’s Inn at which Adelia and her party stay while in Glastonbury. Franklin is a dab hand at developing very strong, memorable characters quite quickly.

Sadly Diana Norman passed away earlier this year and I have not heard of any unpublished manuscripts lying about so I only have one last book in this series to read, which I think I shall save for some time. I thoroughly recommend this installment of the series to anyone who loves getting absorbed in well-written adventures full of memorable characters.

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Relics of the Dead has been reviewed at Euro Crime and Mysteries in Paradise

I have reviewed the first two books in this series Mistress of the Art of Death and The Serpent’s Tale

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My rating 4.5/5
Author website http://www.arianafranklin.com/
Publisher Bantam Press [2009]
ISBN 9781409084334
Length 251 pages
Format eBook (ePub)
Book Series #3 in the Adelia Aguilar/Mistress of the Art of Death series
Source I bought it

Review: A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters

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Title: A Morbid Taste for Bones (the first Brother Cadfael mystery)

Author: Ellis Peters

Narrator: Stephen Thorne

Publisher: BBC [this edition 2005, originally 1977]

Length: 7hrs 38 minutes

Setting: 12th Century, England & Wales

Genre: Historical crime fiction

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 3.5/5

One-liner: A thoroughly immersive historical drama

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In 12th Century England at the Benedictine Monestary of Saints Peter and Paul in Shrewsbury Prior Robert is on a mission to obtain some saintly relics for the Abbey. One of the monks at the Abbey, Brother Columbanus, has a vision that prompts Prior Robert to lead a delegation to Gwytherin in Wales where the bones of Saint Winifred lay, apparently uncared for by the locals. The delegation, including Brothers Columbanus, John and Cadfael (who being Welsh is acting as a translator), arrives in Gwytherin with the approval of the Bishop and the local Prince to remove the bones. However they meet resistance from Lord Rhysart, the town’s leader, but before a full debate can be held Rhysart is murdered and it’s up to Brother Cadfael to determine if the culprit was one of the suitors for his daughter’s affections or, as many of the villagers believe, Prior Robert or another member of the delegation.

Having only ever encountered Brother Cadfael via the wonderful TV series featuring Derek Jacobi in the title role I was wary of embarking on a book whose main characters I already had strong images of in my head. But although I couldn’t help but picture Jacobi throughout the book I don’t think it detracted from my reading in the end. As the first book in the series A Morbid Taste for Bones takes some time to establish the character of Cadfael, revealing some of his personal history before becoming a monk and allowing him to display a range of his talents (as herbalist, detective and matchmaker for starters). Accepting that Cadfael is an extraordinary (bordering on implausible?) person, being wise, well-rounded and pragmatically diplomatic, he and all the other male characters are quite believably depicted in their setting. I’m not quite so convinced by the main female characters, Rhysart’s daughters Sioned and Annest, who appear a little too confident and well-educated to be really believable for their time. I liked them but, like Cadfael himself, they’re a bit more mythological than others such as the ruthless Prior Robert.

It’s the setting of course that really shines here. The details of medieval life are well researched and well displayed. For example the language used is just different enough from today’s English to give a sense of the time difference without actually being contemporary (there would be few people alive who could actually understand 12th Century ‘English’). The themes of this book, religious fervor and familial duty, are entirely fitting for the period and both are treated sensitively and with a surprising amount of depth for what is, at least by today’s standards, a short book (around 200 pages in the print version).

For me the plot was quite predictable but there were enough threads and interesting historical details to keep me engaged and I will certainly seek out some of the books, especially those that weren’t used as the basis for episodes in the TV series (where I won’t be so tempted to make comparisons).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A Morbid Taste for Bones has been reviewed at Rhapsody in Books, Mysteries in Paradise and A Striped Armchair

A Morbid Taste for Bones is the first of 20 books in the Cadfael series written by Ellis Peters (a pseudonym used by Edith Pargeter). Thirteen of the books were used as the basis for episodes of the TV Series.

Review: The Coroner by M R Hall

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Title: The Coroner

Author: M R Hall

Publisher: Macmillan [2009]

ISBN: 978-0-230-71127-3

No. of pages: 422

Jenny Cooper is the newly appointed Coroner for the Severn Vale district of England. Her predecessor died suddenly after dealing with the deaths of two young teenagers who had both spent time in a local youth correctional facility. One, a young boy, was reported to have committed suicide while at the institution and a young girl died seemingly of a heroin overdose shortly after her own stint in the same place. Cooper, recently divorced and recovering from a breakdown and the onset of anxiety attacks, becomes convinced that something untoward led to the two cases being closed so quickly and decides to re-open the investigations.

The book doesn’t fit neatly into any of the established crime fiction sub genres as it tackles the solving of crime from the perspective of a Coroner which, in England, is still a purely legal position similar to a judge or magistrate (in the US the role has in many jurisdictions merged the legal aspects of the job with the medical examiner’s duties). The book does a great job of highlighting this rather unique role in modern justice where the only goal is to determine a person’s cause of death and any criminal charges that might arise from that finding are someone else’s responsibility. Hall does maintain a decent level of tension and interest in what could have become a dry subject bogged down in legal minutiae.

My problem with the plot didn’t lie in the legal details but rather in what felt to me like a bit of overly forced leading of readers down an emotional path. The victims are depicted in a fairly one-dimensional and stereotypical way. The only sense we’re given of them is that they were both troubled, the young boy who died while in custody particularly so, but there’s no real sense of them as individuals. Occasional passages showing the young boy’s mother to be less than perfect, although loving, seemed to have been inserted almost as a dare to readers, and indeed to Cooper herself, to be anything other than outraged at the treatment of the young people. However it always felt like Cooper’s primary goal was her own crusade to get her life back together and the book didn’t give me enough to develop anything more than a detached curiosity about the resolution of the investigations. It tried, I think, to build a real sense of the injustices that can occur within a poorly funded justice system where no one is overtly evil but everyone is too consumed with protecting their own interests than in finding out the truth but I never quite bought it.

The female characters in this book are well developed and depicted. Jenny Cooper’s struggle to function normally while dealing with her depression and anxiety is very credibly portrayed. At times in her professional work however she’s utterly naïve and as petulant as a 4-year old which I found pretty unrealistic for someone who is supposed to have been a family lawyer in the public system for 15 years. Having divorced her controlling husband and barely maintaining a relationship with her own teenage son she develops some new relationships with other women including Alison, her Court Officer who she treats quite shabbily to begin with, and a journalist whose been looking into one of the cases that Cooper decides to re-open. Her supposed love interest, Steve the ageing hippy, didn’t really ring true for me and in fact most of the men are either evil, incompetent or irrelevant which is interesting for a book written by a bloke (cannily using his initials to disguise that fact).

I first added this book to my ‘must read’ list after hearing it discussed with much praise on the BBC 5 Live Books Podcast back in January. This undoubtedly led to me having quite high expectations which is something I try to avoid because, as happened here, the book didn’t quite live up to them. It was by no means bad, and I’ll certainly look out for the next one in the series which is apparently due out in December, but I did feel that parts of the plot were designed too pointedly to elicit outrage without much genuine emotion on offer within the story itself. However the portrayal of a little-known arm of the judicial system was first rate and I think Hall has a real ability to create interesting characters, at least female ones.

My rating 3.5/5

Other Stuff

Reviewed at It’s A Crime! (Or a Mystery)

Reviewed by Maxine at Euro Crime

Reviewed by Sunnie at Aust Crime Fiction

For a different view of this fascinating role within our judicial systems you could try one of my favourite Aussie crime shows on TV. State Coroner ran for two seasons in the late 1990′s and took place in a fictional state Coroner’s Court. It has some fine Aussie Actors (Wendy Hughes in the title role) and the first season is available on DVD for those interested.