@AT Drake, from previous posts, I think you and I may have similar historical mystery tastes, and I've read the first 2 in the Rory Clements/John Shakespeare series and the one with the 2nd Armada threat, and have liked them. Thanks for a chance to pick up a couple more at good prices!
Spoiler:
Quote:
Originally Posted by ATDrake
Thanks for the correction, that does make them sound a bit more interesting; I'd gotten a kind of cozy-ish impression from a quickie skim of just the opening chapter and the general sort of setting (and all the Agatha Awards), which of course is never necessarily representative of how the story will turn out.
In any case, I now have the 1st Maisie Dobbs on loan from the local-library-which-is-within-walking-distance, though I probably won't get around to it until next week after I've finished some other titles which are due Real Soon Now. Sadly, they did not have the early volumes of Don Gutteridge's Marc Edwards series (only #4 & #6, which I just bought), but likely the not-so-local-libraries will have them and I'm probably buying those anyway once they price-drop enough.
Bargain @ $2.99 each from HarperCollins' Witness Impulse imprint (non-couponable, linkage goes to Kobo, price should be good in the standard Canada & US stores, may possibly be matched elsewhere):
#1-4 & #6 in Rory Clements' ( SYKM) John Shakespeare Mystery combo murder/espionage historical series set in Elizabethan England, starring the older brother (entirely fictional) of Will, whom one of the blurbs likens to an Elizabethan Bond (so… a cold-blooded near-sociopathic womanizing manipulator and spy with no life outside of his job  ), in the employ of Sir Francis Walsingham. SYKM says that these have multiple minor award noms, and provides a review for the 1st in series. #5 is currently priced at $9.99, so $3 per novel for 5 out of the 6 seems a pretty good price if this appeals to you.
NB: The author's website says these can be read out of order. And from the TOC listings, it looks like he includes historical notes (and also some supplementary backgrounders on his website). These do sound like they could be my kind of thing (the late Tudor period is one of my favourites to read both fiction and non-), so I'll read the samples, and if they're promising enough give the 1st one a try.
In order: - Martyr, involving an assassination plot on Sir Francis Drake
- Revenger (2010 Historical Dagger Award winner, according to SYKM), supposed to be investigating the doomed Roanoke colony (Wikipedia), which nobody has ever figured out (although the most likely explanation of absorption into the local indigenous populations is probably it)
- Prince, a generic kind of murders and plague thing with no historical name-dropping in the blurb
- Traitor, involving the mystic Dr. John Dee (Wikipedia) and a threat of a second Spanish Armada
- The Heretics (not on sale)
- The Queen's Man, involving yet another plot to free Mary, Queen of Scots (ETA: a customer review says that this is a prequel, being the chronological 1st which explains Our Hero's backstory)
There also happens to be a novella, which is priced at a reasonable 99 cents in the US, and an unreasonable $2.99 in Canada. Our petro-dollar has not fallen that much due to the drop in the price of oil, just so you know.  |