Review by New York Times Review
Lady Elizabeth, Shardlake's royal patron and the future queen, sends him to Norwich to investigate a delicate matter: A distant relative named Edith Boleyn has been murdered in a very obscene fashion and her husband is expected to hang for the crime. "The family name, the foul details of the crime - the pamphleteers will have the time of their lives," predicts a member of the court. Shardlake's orders are to ensure that justice is done. And if it isn't, he has Elizabeth's royal pardon in his pocket. Shardlake participates in a tense murder trial and visits a hellish prison where the condemned await execution - by hanging if they're lucky, by bloodier methods if they're not. And then he lingers in the countryside, struck by the rumbling unrest between displaced peasants and greedy landowners grabbing tracts of common land. Šansom describes 16th-century events in the crisply realistic style of someone watching them transpire right outside his window. He takes a good bit of his plot from the historical peasants' rebellion led by Robert Kett, who appears here as a roguishly romantic hero. The descriptions of Kett's great camp on Mousehold Heath are so vivid you can almost smell the sheep being roasted to feed the thousands of farmers and laborers who make up the rebel army. The historical detail is impressive, but what we remember best are the violent scenes of rioting farmers tearing down the loathed enclosures and the ugly glimpses of women and children being turned out of their homes. Don't believe those tapestries of pretty lords and ladies happily hunting unicorns: The Middle Ages were murder. An autumnal air of melancholy seems to hang over Charles Todd's elegant police procedurals featuring Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard. As THE BLACK ASCOT (Morrow, $26.99) begins, Edward VII has just died and the fashionable socialites attending the 1910 Ascot races are shrouded in mourning. Alan Barrington uses the occasion to arrange a fatal motorcar accident for the man who drove his best friend to commit suicide, or so he believes. Barrington then disappears for nearly 10 years. When he finally resurfaces, Rutledge is sent to discreetly track him down. This reflective series always seems eager to get Todd's sensitive detective out of London and into the English countryside, where the reverberations of World War I are still being felt. In Merwyn, "a gray, bleak village" of lost souls, he finds a wife who thought she was a war widow and her veteran husband, who feels he might as well be dead. And in Hampshire, Rutledge visits a clinic where, staring at shellshocked victims, he sees his own traumatized face. By now I should know better than to continue reading a novel that opens with a telephone call in the middle of the night. It's usually a tipoff that the dialogue is going to be dreary. ("Hello.... Who is this? ... Hello. Hello.... Who is this?") Fiona Barton has written better books than the suspect (Berkley, $26), and I expect to read more of them in the future. But this one recycles familiar themes and old plot points. Kate Waters, a British journalist with amazing survival skills in a weakened industry, takes an assignment involving two teenage girls who have gone missing in Thailand. Since her own son, Jake, is roaming the world and rarely calls home, this case is bound to be a heartbreaker for her and a strain for any reader who doesn't want to plow through another weepy story about suffering mothers and their callous children. But it's my own fault. After all, I caught that middle-of-the-night phone call and I didn't hang up. Here's one for the Shooting Yourself in the Foot Department: THE MURDER PIT (Mira, paper, $15.99), a Victorian potboiler by Mick Finlay, who had the very good idea of spoofing Sherlock Holmes by creating a private investigator who is his exact opposite. Unlike that famed cerebral sleuth, William Arrowood is the detective of last resort, relying on instinct, impulse and sudden brainstorms to resolve distasteful cases for unsavory clients. Norman Barnett, Arrowood's faithful assistant and the narrator of this story, doesn't waste his breath describing bucolic country scenes. And if he and Arrowood should leave London, they're more likely to visit a working farm "with its attack dogs, its slaughter shed, its mountains of stinking dung." Arrowood shows real skill in dealing with the case of Birdie Barclay, who hasn't been heard from since she left home to marry a pig farmer. But Finlay has no sense of proportion. It's not enough that his hero is rude, crude and lacking in social skills. His personal hygiene is so appalling he's unable to eat or drink without soiling himself, so he pretty much smells like a barnyard. Here, have a napkin! MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
There's a line forming to knock the stuffing out of Sherlock Holmes, and here's the latest contender: a fat, flatulent, boozy Victorian private investigative agent named William Arrowood. We met him in Finlay's 2017 Arrowood, and he's still at it. Holmes works by physical clues and his famous logic, he huffs, but sometimes there aren't any clues and people are not logical. Arrowood solves his cases by understanding people. He won't let up, detailing Holmes' faulty reasoning in The Adventure of the Priory School and his deceit in A Case of Identity. Jealous? Yes. Holmes works in a moneyed world, and Arrowood and his Watson, a feistier version named Barnett labor in the miasma of South London. As their current case, an attempt to reunite an aging couple with their daughter, turns murderous, we follow them through a world reeking of open sewers, phlegm, running sores, feces, rotting teeth, and man stink. Readers may find all this realism a bit distracting, but if they can stay focused on the exchanges between Arrowood and Barnett witty, sometimes brutal, and, then, surprisingly moving they'll be fine.--Don Crinklaw Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in 1896, Finlay's enthralling sequel to 2017's Arrowood draws the investigative duo of William Arrowood and Norman Barnett into an emotionally wrenching inquiry. In London, Mr. and Mrs. Barclay hire Arrowood and Barnett to track down their developmentally disabled daughter, Birdie, who married pig farmer Walter Ockwell six months earlier and has not communicated with them since. When the detectives travel to the farm south of the city, they get a harsh reception and are alarmed to find that Birdie has suffered a head injury, which Ockwell, who has spent time in prison for attacking a man with a club, claims was accidental. The case gets even darker when the partners learn that three children have died on the farm, but only one was buried. In an inventive move, Finlay casts Arrowood as an alternative Sherlock Holmes, who, instead of relying on physical clues and logic, focuses on the psychology of the people involved. This is a welcome grittier take on a familiar genre trope. Agent: Jo Unwin, Jo Unwin Literary Agency (U.K.) (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
William Arrowood, the poor man's Sherlock Holmes, goes looking for a silent bride and finds a cesspool of corruption.It's been six months since "weak-minded" Birdie Barclay married pig farmer Walter Ockwell, and in all that time her parents, insurance clerk Dunbar and singing teacher Martha Barclay, haven't had one word from her. They just want to know she's all right, they tearfully assure Arrowood and his sidekick and amanuensis, Norman Barnett. Huffing at the much richer pot Holmes got for solving "The Adventure of the Priory School," Arrowood relieves the Barclays of a trifling sum and sets off for the Ockwell farm, where he intimates that he's brought news of a legacy to Birdie but is still prevented from seeing her by Walter Ockwell and his sister, Rosanna, who insist that Birdie isn't home even though Arrowood can see her signaling him from an upstairs window as he leaves. When a more direct attempt to unite Birdie with her parents fails, Arrowood hunkers down to investigate possible skulduggery at the farm, which seems to employ no one but the kinds of mentally challenged patients the Caterham Asylum deals with. For his pains he's warned off by Sgt. Root, of the Catford and Lewisham Police, and Barnett is soundly beaten. Edna Gillie, a woman who hints at stories of three dead children, disappears herself soon after Arrowood's one conversation with her, and he fears that she's dead, and that she's not the only one. What has Birdie gotten herself into, and can a man who sets himself apart from Holmes by calling himself "an emotional detective. I try and solve my cases by understanding people" extricate her from the danger?Better detective work than the series kickoff (Arrowood, 2017) and less emphasis on the hero's amusingly futile rivalry with Holmes even though his case ends up echoing "The Priory School" in more uncomfortable ways than he could have imagined. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
