Rating: WARTY!
How cool is that title? I hate novels which fail - utterly and miserably - to live up to their title and this was one. Note this is not to be confused with the novel of the same name by Diana Norman, which I have not read. This is one of those historical, if not hysterical, novels which forgets that it's supposed to be telling a story and instead regurgitates the author's extensive notes. Pages and pages were wasted with extraneous detail and long rambling conversations which were utterly irrelevant to the main story and served solely to let the author show off. This alone turned me off the story, but there was less. Much much less!
There never was a Thomas à Becket. It was Thomas Becket. It wasn't until long after his time that some moron decided to add the à. No one in his time would ever have used that form, yet this author does. This is one of many anachronisms. I don't expect a story set in 1171 (or whenever), to use the language from that time period, but neither do I expect an historical story to be written in thoroughly modern English with thoroughly modern sensibilities. It was ridiculous.
I listened to the audio book, and the most hilarious thing was when the reader described someone eating "pasties." This word is pronounced PASS-tees, not "pastries" without the 'r'. It's a type of pastry eaten in England, but the way this reader read it made it sound like the guy was eating those stick-on nipple covers which showgirls use. I laughed out loud, and the sad thing is that this is the best part of the entire novel.
The blurb has this novel of medieval England as "A chilling, mesmerizing novel that combines the best of modern forensic thrillers with the detail and drama of historical fiction." It's not. It's neither chilling nor mesmerizing, and while I applaud the desire to put a strong female character into a medieval novel, it's hard to do convincingly, and this one didn't work for me, especially since the story unfolds as slow as molasses in an Alaska winter.
The premise is that the church has sent a woman from Italy to investigate a series of child murders in England. This is absurd. Why would anyone care about children being murdered in medieval times? They wouldn't have cared in England, much less in Italy. It's entirely wrong, I agree, but this was the attitude back then. No one cared that much! I felt the story would have been stronger if there had been more behind this motivation, and there really wasn't. Basically, all the author did was say, "This is how it is!" It was unconvincing at best. There's a big non sequitur lurking between the fact of female physicians extant in Italy and the dispatch of one - by the church! - to investigate children going missing in England.
The attempt to give the visiting physician some street cred by having her save the clergyman's life felt way too forced and was also unconvincing. If the visiting physician had been Arabic (and therefore would pretty much have to have been be male) I might have bought the CSI stuff. If it had been Chinese and female I might have bought it, but the way this was launched didn't float my boat. There's a big difference between saying, hey, Italy allowed female physicians, and saying, hey this Italian female doctor is a whiz at solving murders and therefore is going to England! The church detested women in any role other than mistress, and they positively abhorred science. Galileo was censured and Giordano Bruno was burned by the church just a couple of hundred years after this novel is set, so this was too much of a reach, and was a DNF for me.
I DNF'd it because it was so awful. The idea of a learned woman, especially one who is a forensic scientist, having to go undercover in England to avoid accusations of being a witch is a truly compelling one, but the only execution here was that of a good idea for a novel.
