Every reader has a favorite time and place that they most enjoy reading about, and my favorite time is the Dark and Medieval Ages. Although the setting could be in any country, ancient England and France are far and away my favorite places. Must be something about wanting to be a princess when I was a little girl, you think? I enjoy strong women protagonists; a rarity of the time, so it was with great delight that I discovered Ariane Franklin's first novel, Mistress of the Art of Death, which follows an unusual woman with a forbidden skill. This is the first is a series about Adelia, the Mistress of the Art of Death.
An intelligent, mesmerizing novel that melds a forensic thriller with great historical detail. In Medieval Cambridge, four children have been sadistically murdered, their deaths blamed on the Jews. A worried King Henry II contacts the King of Sicily asking for their best doctor of death, and doesn’t exactly get what he asked for. Instead, he gets Adelia; a mistress of death; a doctor trained in Salerno, Italy, but still; a woman. However, she can discern, through careful examination of a body, how a person died. Problem is that women with medical skills were often seen as witches, so Adelia must deflect her doctoring talents onto a man; her traveling companion Mansur, a Moor. Her other companion is Simon, a Jew. Adelia’s skills, and the help of Ulf, a young but rough boy, his mother Glytha, and a tax collector named Sir Rowley Picot, lead them ever closer to the man responsible for the heinous killings, but then, too close. Simon is found drowned, Ulf is kidnapped, and Adelia must find him before he suffers the horrible fate of the other children. A great read that transports you back to the sounds, sights and smells of the early Plantagenet era with a vulnerable but spirited heroine.
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