Favourite Discoveries of 2015 (8)

The penultimate entry in the series of posts containing the Euro Crime reviewers' Favourite Discoveries of 2015 is my own, rambling contribution!

Firstly, to continue the DVD theme of previous posts, I have two recommendations:

The Saboteurs which was shown on tv but I caught up with on DVD courtesy of the library.

It's the Second Word War and the story is told from the point view of the Germans, the British and the Norwegians; it revolves around the production of heavy water in Norway which is wanted in Germany to create an atomic bomb.

When a Norwegian scientist escapes to Britain he is recruited to oversee the Allies operation to infiltrate the Norwegian factory in Telemark and destroy its heavy water making facilities.

With a multi-national cast speaking in their own languages this was a gripping drama and having not seen the film The Heroes of Telemark and showing my ignorance of this time period, this was all new to me.

My second recommendation is Agent Carter which though set in the US stars a trio of British actors: Hayley Atwell, Dominic Cooper and the (hilarious) James D'Arcy - unrecognisable from Broadchurch.

It's 1946 New York and Atwell plays Peggy Carter, a British agent with the Strategic Scientific Reserve. She has been relegated to tea-making even though she's sharper than all the male agents put together.

Agent Carter is recruited by Howard Stark to clear his name which means going against the organisation she works for.

So begins a cat and mouse chase with the net ever tightening on Peggy.

I was a little dubious after the first episode which was very Alias-y with Peggy in a wig however I stuck with it and found it very tense and enjoyable.




Next, going off topic a little now, 2015 was the year I rediscovered my interest in the Tudor period. I think it began with the superlative Wolf Hall drama - the soundtrack is marvellous - though my OH refers to it as "that melancholy music"...

Then, as the library has not been buying as many books this year due to a book fund "pause", I have been trying books I perhaps wouldn't have usually. And so Philippa Gregory's The Taming of the Queen, about Catherine Parr, fell into my hands. And so the Tudor floodgates have opened. I have bought a box-set of Jean Plaidy books - I may have read some of these a long time ago but it's so long ago they'll seem fresh! - and have checked out from the library, books on Henry VIII's queens. So far I've concentrated my reading on Catherine Parr and can recommend Elizabeth Norton's The Temptation Of Elizabeth Tudor which covers the time when Elizabeth was staying with her step-mother, as well as Norton's biography, Catherine Parr.

My other rediscovery is Michael Connelly - but more on him in a separate post.

More Tudor Crime - M J Trow

I've mentioned the increasing number of books set in Tudor times. M J Trow, author of 2001's Who Killed Kit Marlowe? A Contract to Murder in Elizabethan England and the crime series featuring Lestrade and Maxwell (the latter being very popular in my library) has begun a new series featuring one Christopher "Kit" Marlowe under Severn House's Creme de la Crime imprint. The first book, Dark Entry came out in May and the second, Silent Court, will be out in December.

Cambridge, 1583. About to graduate from Corpus Christi, the young Christopher Marlowe spends his days studying and his nights carousing with old friends. But when one of them is discovered lying dead in his King's College room, mouth open in a silent scream, Marlowe refuses to accept the official verdict of suicide. Calling on the help of his mentor, Sir Roger Manwood, Justice of the Peace, and the queen's magus, Dr John Dee, a poison expert, Marlowe sets out to prove that his friend was murdered . . .

Dr John Dee also appears in Phil Rickman's new series which began with The Bones of Avalon.

Severn House's books are stocked in libraries (and the slightly cheaper trade paperback and Kindle versions appear to be available a few months after the hardback release).

The Tudor Secret - Cover Opinions

Here's a new Tudor-era set crime novel for fans of books set in that period. The Tudor Secret by C W Gortner came out this month in the UK and will be out in the US on 1 February.

Synopsis:

Summer 1553: A time of danger and deceit. Brendan Prescott, an orphan, is reared in the household of the powerful Dudley family. Brought to court, he finds himself sent on an illicit mission to the King’s brilliant but enigmatic sister, Princess Elizabeth. But Brendan is soon compelled to work as a double agent by Elizabeth’s protector, William Cecil—who promises in exchange to help him unravel the secret of his own mysterious past.

A dark plot swirls around Elizabeth's quest to unravel the truth about the ominous disappearance of her seriously ill brother, King Edward VI. With Elizabeth's lady-in-waiting at his side, Brendan plunges into a ruthless gambit of half-truths, lies, and murder. Filled with the intrigue and pageantry of Tudor England, THE TUDOR SECRET is the first book in the Elizabeth's Spymaster series.

So what are you thoughts on the US (LHS) and UK (RHS) covers? Which would entice you to pick the book up? And what about initials vs full name?

If you have read it, how well do the covers match the story?

Tudor Crime II

I posted back in March about the rise of Tudor-era crime fiction and here are a couple more titles to add to the wish list, if you like that sort of thing, both published this month:

The Courier's Tale by Peter Walker
Reginald Pole, diplomat, friend of scholars, cardinals and artists, and cousin to Henry VIII, is first seen stealing into the Medici chapel at dead of night to catch a forbidden glimpse of Michelangelo's masterpiece of funerary sculpture. But as the king's representative in Italy, and an admired scholar himself, it falls to him to make the case for Henry's divorce from Katherine of Aragon. And it falls to the hapless Michael Throckmorton to become Thomas Cromwell's courier to Pole in Rome. In Peter Walker's imaginative novel, in which two worlds, increasingly opposed, are beautifully evoked, we see these famous events that saw England become a Protestant nation through the eyes of the luckless courier. The dubious privilege of being courier to Cromwell and the King, makes of Michael Throckmorton's life a tragicomedy of endless journeys back and forth between England and Italy. And even though in time he becomes the loyal friend of the disgraced Pole, who can never risk returning to England while Henry lives, this is no compensation for the childhood love who appears to have been lost along the way.

Sacred Treason by James Forrester
London, 1563. England is a troubled nation. Catholic plots against the young Queen Elizabeth spring up all over the country. The herald William Harley - known to everyone as Clarenceux - receives a book from his friend and fellow Catholic, Henry Machyn. But Machyn is in fear of his life... What secret can the book hold? And then Clarenceux is visited by the State in the form of Francis Walsingham and his ruthless enforcers, who will stop at nothing to gain possession of it. If Clarenceux and his family are to survive the terror of the state, he must solve the clues contained in the book to unlock its dangerous secrets before it's too late. And when he does, he realises that it's not only his life and the lives of those most dear to him that are at stake...

Tudor Crime

Tudor era crime fiction seems to be quite popular at the moment. The latest in C J Sansom's Shardlake series, Heartstone, will be out in September:

It was summer, 1545. England is at war. Henry VIII's invasion of France has gone badly wrong, and a massive French fleet is preparing to sail across the Channel. As the English fleet gathers at Portsmouth, the country raises the largest militia army it has ever seen. The King has debased the currency to pay for the war, and England is in the grip of soaring inflation and economic crisis. Meanwhile Matthew Shardlake is given an intriguing legal case by an old servant of Queen Catherine Parr. Asked to investigate claims of 'monstrous wrongs' committed against a young ward of the court, which have already involved one mysterious death, Shardlake and his assistant Barak journey to Portsmouth. Once arrived, Shardlake and Barak find themselves in a city preparing to become a war zone; and Shardlake takes the opportunity to also investigate the mysterious past of Ellen Fettipace, a young woman incarcerated in the Bedlam. The emerging mysteries around the young ward, and the events that destroyed Ellen's family nineteen years before, involve Shardlake in reunions both with an old friend and an old enemy close to the throne. Events will converge on board one of the King's great warships, primed for battle in Portsmouth harbour.

In the meantime, S J Parris's Heresy has just been published:

Introducing the monk Giodarno Bruno, magician, scientist, and heretic in a new series of historical thrillers for fans of C.J.Sansom and 'The Name of the Rose' England, 1583 A country awash with paranoia and conspiracy -- but a safe haven for a radical monk on the run. Giordano Bruno, with his theories of astronomy and extraterrestrial life, has fled the Inquisition for the court of Elizabeth I. Here, he attracts the attention of Francis Walsingham, chief spymaster and sworn enemy of Catholic plotters. Bruno is sent undercover to Oxford, where the university is believed to be a hotbed of French dissent. Bruno quickly finds himself drawn into college intrigues, and distracted by a beautiful young woman. Before long, he is investigating a hideous series of murders, each linked by a letter offering clues. The letters suggest that each victim was guilty of heresy. But is Bruno being aided or misled - or is he himself the next target? Stalking a cunning and determined killer through the shadowy cloisters of Oxford, Bruno realizes that even the wise cannot always tell truth from heresy. But some are prepared to kill for it!

On the 1st April, the first in a new series - Bones of Avalon - from Phil Rickman will be published:

Religious strife, Glastonbury legends, the bones of King Arthur and the curse of the Tudors...can Renaissance man John Dee help the young Queen Elizabeth to avoid it? It is 1560. Elizabeth Tudor has been on the throne for a year, the date for her coronation having been chosen by her astrologer, Dr John Dee, at just 32 already famous throughout Europe as a mathematician and expert in the hidden arts. But neither Elizabeth nor Dee feel entirely secure. Both have known imprisonment for political reasons. The Queen is unpopular with both Roman Catholics and the new breed of puritanical protestant. Dee is regarded with suspicion in an era where the dividing line between science and sorcery is, at best, indistinct. And the assignment he's been given by the Queen's chief minister, Sir William Cecil, will blur it further: ride to the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, bring back King Arthur's bones. The mission takes the mild, bookish Dee to the tangled roots of English magic and the Arthurian legacy so important to the Tudors. Into unexpected violence, spiritual darkness, the breathless stirring of first love...and the cold heart of a complex plot against Elizabeth. With him is his friend and former student, Robert Dudley, a risk-taker, a wild card...and possibly the Queen's secret lover. Dee is Elizabethan England's forgotten hero. A man for whom this world - even the rapidly-expanding world of the Renaissance - was never enough.

On the 29th April, Revenger, the sequel to Martyr by Rory Clements will be out:

1592. England and Spain are at war, yet there is peril at home, too. The death of her trusted spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham has left Queen Elizabeth vulnerable. Conspiracies multiply. The quiet life of John Shakespeare is shattered by a summons from Robert Cecil, the cold but deadly young statesman who dominated the last years of the Queen's long reign, insisting Shakespeare re-enter government service. His mission: to find vital papers, now in the possession of the Earl of Essex. Essex is the brightest star in the firmament, a man of ambition. He woos the Queen, thirty-three years his senior, as if she were a girl his age. She is flattered by him -- despite her loathing for his mother, the beautiful, dangerous Lettice Knollys who presides over her own glittering court -- a dazzling array of the mad, bad, dangerous and disaffected. When John Shakespeare infiltrates this dissolute world he discovers not only that the Queen herself is in danger -- but that he and his family is also a target. With only his loyal footsoldier Boltfoot Cooper at his side, Shakespeare must face implacable forces who believe themselves above the law: men and women who kill without compunction. And in a world of shifting allegiances, just how far he can trust Robert Cecil, his devious new master?

Available on import (to the UK) we have the first in a new series from Peg Herring, Her Highness' First Murder which came out in January:

Elizabeth Tudor is as appalled as everyone else when headless corpses litter the streets of London, but when one of her own ladies is murdered, she vows to stop the killer. Her new friend Simon Maldon wants to help, and they join with a sergeant of the King’s Welsh Guard to investigate. Is the killer Elizabeth’s castellan? A creepy cleric who manages her household accounts? A madman captured on the grounds?

Religion seems to be a factor, since the murdered women are dressed in nun’s robes. Is it due to the fact that Henry’s beheaded two wives or that he’s outlawed Catholicism in England? The answers aren’t clear, but danger soon stalks the two young people. As the guardsmen search frantically for the depraved killer, Simon finds himself a prisoner, alone and in trouble. Elizabeth’s life is threatened as well. It may be too late for one of them, maybe both, to emerge from Her Highness’ first murder alive.

Queen Elizabeth I also appears in a seven book series by Karen Harper.