Bookraft

The murder mystery genre is alive and doing very well if TV and fiction are to be considered. Edgar Allen and Sir Arthur launched a not so mysteriously flourishing phenomenon. But there are problems in the Rue Morgue - 1)popularity breeds fictional infestation and the need to wander ever farther from the beaten gumshoe tracks and 2)ever increasing beastliness seems to thrive as depraved serial killers appear to be de rigeur mortis.

Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death manages to defeat problem 1) but falls beastfully bad into the serial murder pit of a problem 2). Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar is a 25 year old Sicilian doctor uniquely versed in the coroner's arts as they stood in Europe at 1200AD. This is the stylistic catch - a historical setting and sleuthing personality most curiously fetching. History, English History, is rendered under the reign of Henry II who is trying to rule (= stay alive). So what is the Mistress of Death doing in times where the quickest excuse for rebellion can and will be used by Baron and Lords Feudal to make the current King extinct ?

She has been called by Henry from his cousin's kingdom of Sicily to assist on solving the child murders occurring in Cambridge and ruining one of the main tax cash cows there, Henry's sanctioned Jewish money lenders. The Jews have been accused of the crimes and have already suffered a lynching even though 3 more child murders have occurred. Yes its serial murderers in medieval Times.

Okay - given the brutality of the Crusades and the Plague, one can accept some inklings of this modern murderous twist. And the richness of the description of the daily life of Englishmen in a Medieval town makes for genuine attraction. But the story turns on one too many excesses - and almost defeats the whole endeavour. Sublety, in the name of the monarch's role, just fails to rescue the book.

And remarkably what this women writer gets wrong is the romance and the need to show Doctor Vesuvia confronting the killer mano a womano. Neither is convincing. The number of dumb decisions that Doctor Vesuvia makes after the true gumshoe, Simon of Naples, is offed is discouragingly exponential. But the romance between her and barrister/tax man/kingly adviser Rolley Picot is singularly unconvincing. Its like an anachronistic Cosmo or Sex in the City fling. Not a whit of the intelligence Mme Vesuvia has shown heretofore comes to bear on their curt courtship. Its as willfully short sighted and unconvincing as King Henry's dictate at the end of the story. And this is a pity because the country side, many of the characters, and the revealed English history are of themselves well worth the reading.