So during a recent Fictionwise sale, I bought a few 1st in series books from
Belgrave House, which does DRM-free reprints of backlist mystery/historical/mostly romance for a fairly reasonable $5 each, which can be taken down to an very nice $2 with appropriate couponage.
Based on what I've finished so far, it looks like I'll be spending a lot more on their catalogue in the near future.
My first two selected reads were both murder mysteries set amongst the early New England Puritan settlers (or recreations thereof), with female amateur sleuths who end up getting help from Native Americans who may or may not be set up for some future sidekick role, and were interesting to contrast and compare.
Murder at Plimoth Plantation by
Leslie Wheeler, was 1st in the Miranda Lewis series. They're kind of cozy-esque, but not quite cozy, as she's some sort of historian/writer, but lacks the seemingly requisite antiques/crafts/bookshop, decorating/catering business, and/or pet cats who help solve the cases.
Long story short: Miranda's niece is an "interpreter", a volunteer historical recreationist at a tourist edutainment village who plays the part of an actual historical personage like a living museum demo, who gets caught up in a murder where some of the clues come in allusions to the shadowed pasts of the original
Mayflower settlers.
I rather liked this one. While I think that some of the danger to the amateur sleuth was rather exaggerated (I can only take so many suspected attempts on the sleuth's life and those of potential informants because they are Getting Too Close before I roll my eyes thusly
), I did like how the people closest to her who should have been more helpful were kind of obstructionist and blamed her for making a bad situation worse by openly meddling in it.
Somehow, I find that more realistic than stuff where everyone who's not a suspicious suspect is tripping over themselves to enable and protect the person who's just gotten in way over their head, and act like it's perfectly normal and only to be expected that they do this every week (or "every year, another dead body" if they manage to get a series contract).
Mild-to-moderate recommend. Writing quite decent, whodunnit made sense and unfolded okay, plot twists mostly quite reasonable, and trail of clues not too obscure to follow, and a minimum of annoying relationship drama, but I suspect that it'll help if you're already interested in mysteries with history in them. They're pleasantly enjoyable and good enough reading if you like this sort of thing, but nothing really exceptional.
Stephen Lewis's
The Dumb Shall Sing, on the other hand, has a level of quality almost close enough to being exceptional that I give it a general recommend for historical mystery readers, even if Colonial America is not an era you'd be particularly interested in reading.
This one is actually set back in the 1600s, and has a deft use of both the more formal period-esque language in the narrative and speech patterns in the dialogue, as well as an understanding of the precarious social position of widow and midwife Catherine Williams, the amateur sleuth, and the tensions between the settlers and the natives which affect her interactions with Massaquoit, the
Pequot who's not sure whether or not he wants to get involved and help her clear a false accusation which follows a sudden death.
The portrayal of the mindset of the Puritan settlers and the milieu in which they believed and lived was done quite well, I thought, with Catherine's having to resort to quoting justifying scripture to get people to grudgingly accept her more unconventional actions when reasoned argument fails, as well as the atmosphere of increasing fear and superstition which allows the village to become a crucible for accusations of witchcraft, with Catherine herself not being immune to suspecting an isolated elderly neighbour of causing her toothache, despite defending the woman's probable innocence to her rumour-spreading servant.
About the only significant flaw was that the whodunnit was fairly easy to guess, since there was a very limited pool of actual suspects and obvious misdirection is obvious. However, this is more a read not for the sleuth successfully catching the guilty culprit, but instead trying to prevent an innocent accusee from becoming the next person to die, at the hands of the ones seeking justice for the original death.
Strong recommend. This would be a well-told tale regardless of whether or not historical mysteries of this type are really your thing, and if they happen to be, all the better, since it counts as a rather good one indeed.
I read my copy from the library's e-book collection as I figured I'd save my $2 to begin with and spend it on the non-library sequels if I turned out to like the 1st book enough to continue. As it is, I'll be buying not just the sequels, but also this first volume, because I think it's definitely worth it, especially at such a low price and DRM-free MultiFormat,
pour encourager les autres.