Of course I'm still way off my target of finishing the darn thing before the film comes out or, you know, before the next ice age, but it feels like a massive achievement.
So I took a break from the epic french novel to indulge in one of my reading guilty pleasures, namely medieval mystery novels. In a previous incarnation I was a medieval history student, and occasionally I like to remember those care free days with an actual real scholarly book, other times I just read a novel set in that period for a quick medieval fix. Lee Child with his rubbish book of rubbishness and Victor Hugo with his long book of much longness were kinda killing my love of reading a little, so I decided to have a go at medieval mystery that I've fancied reading for ages, and that has been gathering dust on my shelf for a few years now. Also it's set in Cambridge, which I recently visited for the first time, so it seemed an apt choice.
'Mistress of the Art of Death', as the name suggests, has a female protagonist, and this is the first murder mystery I've tackled with one. My medieval regulars are normally male, with Brother Cadfael (the late Ellis Peters hero) and Captain Own Archer (Cadace Robb's rather dashing male lead) serving as my regular medieval fixes. The historian in me sees the sense in male protagonists in this time period, and I was wary of a female lead, not least a female medical lead. Still every review I have read of this book told me it was historically accurate, so I shushed my internal historian and decided to give Dr. Adelia Aguilar a go.
The story focuses on a party of foreigners led by the feisty (just an aside why are female protagonists always feisty? is it just me?) Dr. Aguilar who arrive in Cambridge to seek the murderer of a child and find some further missing children. To be fair to her the doctor is pretending not to be a doctor, and has traveled from a medical school in Italy, which historians do believe educated women. They soon uncover the bodies of further children, and must find the murderer quickly as the townsfolk of Cambridge are pretty keen on blaming the Jews and slaughtering them in revenge. In true heroine fashion Adelia dramatically finds the killer, escapes his fearsome clutches, falls in love along the way and is commended by the king and encouraged to stay in England to find more killers to ensure further books in the series. Pretty standard stuff really.
But what is far from standard in this book is the completely vile, disgusting, stomach turning child murders. Now don't get me wrong, there ain't a child murder that is pleasant, but this book reaches new heights of grossness. Brother Cadfael's murder investigations normally were only as graphic as a nun drinking poison, or an infected dagger wound, and that is kinda what I want. I have no stomach for vile murders, if I wanted that I would read some of the more modern serial killer novels, or, you know, a Jack Reacher book. So reading about children having their eyelids cut off and being raped to death was not exactly what I either wanted or expected. Nor was I prepared for a graphic confrontation with a naked, skull masked murder in a remote clay mine with a heroine who must shout the most vile insults she can think of at the raping bastard in order to make him loose his erection and prevent him getting it on with an 8 year old boy. Not good. Not nice. Not right.
In fact the book really made me think the author wanted to write something more gritty and modern, but felt that she should set it in the past for some reason. The book is set during the reign of Henry II, one of my favorite kings, and one of Ariana Frankin's too apparently, as she wrote a quite academic book about his legal system (under her real name Diana Norman). Perhaps this is why she wanted to write a historical book, which features Henry himself, even with a more modern zeal for gore! Overall I would probably read the next book in the series, which is also sat on my shelf, to test how far this gore goes. Sadly there will only be the few book in this series that are already published, as the author has recently pasted away.
