Half of London is watching as St Paul’s burns during the opening scene of The Ashes of London – Andrew Taylor’s first book in his historical mystery series featuring investigative clerk, James Marwood. We are there in the crowd as the rats scamper for their lives and the beloved cathedral begins to collapse. Out of the crowd, a boy runs towards the conflagration, and Marwood dashes to stop him. Only, he turns out to be a she and instead of explaining herself, the girl bites Marwood, making off with his cloak.
Yes, it’s 1666, the year that brought the Great Fire of London. You can feel the heat as Marwood views the scene he must report on to his bosses. It’s not easy being the son of a Fifth Monarchist, a follower of a faith that believes the current monarch (Charles II) should die in order to bring about the second coming of Christ. Marwood senior has served time in the tower for his beliefs, and this has left him frail and suffering from dementia. Young James has to manage his father, keep his demanding job at Whitehall, and investigate a murder – in this case, a body discovered in the ruins of St Pauls, with distinctive wounds – expertly stabbed at the top of the spine, hands tied together by the thumbs. Continue reading “Book Review: The Ashes of London by Andrew Taylor”
A few pages into this book, you know you are in the hands of an Irish author. It’s got that chatty, let’s sit down and tell you a story manner that you often get with Irish authors. The first-person narration also helps, but most of all it’s that rambly, discursive but hugely entertaining style of writing that draws you in and won’t let go, even when the book is five hundred pages long, and could have been around 350. Maybe.
Gosh, how do you begin to try and describe a book like this one? 
William Boyd is one of those rare writers you can trust to turn in a taut and thrilling plot while paying attention to the fine craft of writing. His sentences are thoughtful and elegant and his characters multi-faceted. So it is with 
I confess to a love-hate relationship with Maisie Dobbs. 
I reviewed 
Darnell, a solitary forty-something who runs a cleaning company called Clean Slate. Her father, Terry Darnell, a career policeman, had always wanted her to join the force, but a messy divorce and Stella’s resentment that he’d always put his job before his daughter meant that she preferred to do her own thing. She likes things tidy, obsessively so, and being her own boss; Clean Slate is perfect – until Stella’s father dies.
I love it when I discover a new series at its very beginning and enjoy it so much I read each book that follows as soon as it comes out. So it is with Abir Mukherjee’s mysteries set in Calcutta in the early 1920s. Featuring ex-pat British policeman, Capt. Sam Wyndham, the author throws you right into Calcutta during the British Raj era. Wyndham is still recovering (or not!) from his time in the trenches of WW1, and the loss of his much-loved wife during the flu epidemic, self-medicating with opium. It’s just as well he’s so smart, energetic and won’t let the rules get in the way of his investigations or he’d never catch the perpetrators.
Judith McKinnon 