Rebel Cast out from his home, rejected by his family, Tom Rivers returns to his regiment. But his commander believes the young hothead’s recklessness and contempt for authority has no place in his troop. But to a spymaster like Captain Crafte, Tom’s dark and fearless nature is in itself a weapon to be turned upon the hated Cavaliers – who else would dare to infiltrate Oxford, now the Royalist capital, to destroy the King’s printing press and strike a blow at the very heart of the enemy?

Renegade Raw with grief at the death of his father, Edmund Rivers rejects the peace talks between Parliament and the King. He chooses instead to lead a hardened band of marauders across the moors, appearing out of the frozen world to fall on unsuspecting rebel columns like wolves. But Prince Rupert – recognising in Mun a fellow child of war – has other plans for him, from stealing a colossal gun, to tunneling beneath the walls of Lichfield. The only peace the enemy will get from Mun Rivers is that of the grave.

Huntress Her heart broken following the deaths of her beloved Emmanuel and her father, Bess Rivers takes the hardest decision of her life: to leave her new-born son and depart Sheer House in search of the one person who might help her re-unite what is left of her broken family. Risking her own life on the road, Bess will do whatever it takes to find her brother Tom and secure his Royal pardon, but can she douse the flames of her brothers’ fury and see them reconciled?

The first book in this series The Bleeding Land, made the top 5 of my favourite books of 2012, so my expectations for Brothers’ Fury were high. How would Kristian follow up the harrowing and fascinating experience of that book? Quite well, actually. In fact, I could just copy/paste my review for The Bleeding Land, update some of the details so they’d apply to this book and you’d have a pretty good description of how I felt about this book. Of course, I won’t do that, so I’ll focus on some different elements than I did last time.  Continue reading »

London, 1583. When young, aspiring playwright William Shakespeare encounters Lucy Morgan, one of Queen Elizabeth I’s ladies-in-waiting, the two fall passionately in love. He declares Lucy the inspiration for his work, but what secret is Will hiding his muse?

Meanwhile, Lucy has her own secret – one that could destroy her world if exposed. No longer the chaste maid so valued by the Virgin Queen, she bore witness to the clandestine wedding of Lettice Knollys and Robert Dudley, a match forbidden by the monarch.

England is in peril. Queen Elizabeth’s health is deteriorating, her throne under siege from Catholic plotters and threats of war with Spain. Faced with deciding the fate of her long-term prisoner, Mary, Queen of Scots, she needs a trusted circle of advisors around her now more than ever. But who can she turn to when those closest to her proved disloyal?

And how secure is Lucy’s position at court, now that she has learned the dangerous art of keeping secrets?

With His Dark Lady, Victoria Lamb returns us to the court of Elizabeth I and the story of Lucy Morgan. After enjoying her debut novel, The Queen’s Secret, I was really looking forward to getting back to Lamb’s version of Elizabeth’s court and the promised re-appearance of William Shakespeare. And while it was a pleasure to return to Elizabeth, Lucy and Lucy’s guardian Goodluck, I was a little disappointed in Shakespeare, largely due to his treatment of both Lucy and his wife, Anne Hathaway.

As in The Queen’s Secret, His Dark Lady is told from four perspectives: Lucy, Elizabeth, Goodluck, and Shakespeare. And again there are two narrative strands; the one revolving around Lucy and Shakespeare, and the one revolving around the Queen and the Catholic plotters scheming to get Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne. Whereas in the previous book I preferred the romantic plotline concerning Elizabeth, Lettice, and Leicester over the assassination plot, in this book I infinitely preferred the sections dealing with the Catholic conspiracies and the effects being continuously under threat has on Elizabeth, above those dealing with the love story between Lucy and Shakespeare.

Why did the relationship between Shakespeare and Lucy bother me so? There are several answers to that question. To start off with, let me tell what the answer isn’t. It isn’t the fact that he was in fact cheating on his wife with Lucy. This is historical fiction set in Tudor times, as such it would have been surprising if he had been faithful to her. No what bothered me in this regard was the fact that he lied about it to Lucy. For someone to start a relationship with someone under false pretences, to create expectations where there can be none, is exceptionally cruel an unjust and I had a hard time swallowing Will’s dishonesty. In addition, he’s borderline abusive of his wife, demanding she sleep with him, and similarly, uses the excuse of being overwhelmed with passion to ignore Lucy when she tells him no. There were several times when their encounters felt more like rape than love-making, having Will insisting that Lucy’s no actually means yes, and I found these scenes and the entire relationship quite disturbing. In fact, at one point Will behaves as nothing so much as a stalker, following Lucy around and turning up in her room and at her door unexpectedly. It made Will a very unsympathetic, self-centred character, who I didn’t really enjoy spending time with. The situation also made me quite frustrated with Lucy, as I just wanted her to stop and be strong and send him away for good – not unlike the way I wanted Elizabeth to dismiss Leicester in the previous novel – and I kept wondering where the level-headed and independent Lucy we met in The Queen’s Secret had gone.

Elizabeth, on the other hand, while still hung-up on Leicester, seems to be focused on other things in this book and I found the portrait Lamb sketched of the aging Elizabeth fascinating. The Queen becomes more and more aware of her own mortality, both due to her age and due to the increasing amounts of plots against her life, which increases not just her irascibility and temper, but also makes her increasingly paranoid and rebellious at being continuously guarded. One of the recurring points in the discussions is the need to remove the main focus of the Catholic plotters in the person of Mary, Queen of Scots. Lamb manages to create great pathos in Elizabeth’s feelings for her Royal cousin, giving her not just political motivations to refrain from executing her, but also alluding to a strange kind of empathy Elizabeth feels for Mary, even saying she is as much a prisoner as Mary is; while she holds Mary prisoner, she is held prisoner in turn by the restrictions on her freedom due to the plots against her. Elizabeth is not always likeable in this incarnation created by Lamb, but she is sympathetic and very human.

Goodluck is a connecting factor in both storylines. I liked him just as much as I did in the previous book and strangely enough, I was far less creeped out by his conflicted feelings for Lucy this time around. This could be because we quickly jump ahead eight years in the book and Lucy isn’t quite as young or quite as depended on him anymore, but I think the fact that I’d rather see her end up with Goodluck, who truly loves her, rather than throw herself away on the cad Will Shakespeare is in the book has a lot to do with it too. His role as a spy for Walsingham is fascinating and gives us a good insight into both sides.

Overall, I’m afraid to say that while I enjoyed my time spent with His Dark Lady, I didn’t enjoy it as much as The Queen’s Secret, mostly due to Shakespeare and his relationship with Lucy. However, this is a rather personal reaction to his characterisation, not because the story is badly written, so your mileage may vary on that. Still, I’m looking forward to returning to Elizabeth and Lucy’s world once more in the next book and see what happens to both our heroines and what Lamb will focus on next. For an original and exciting take on Elizabeth I and the Tudor court, you can’t go wrong with Victoria Lamb’s Lucy Morgan books.

This book was provided for review by the publisher.

SUMMER, 1643. England is at war with itself. King Charles I has fled London, his negotiations with Parliament in tatters. The country is consumed by bloodshed.

For Thomas Hill, a man of letters quietly running a bookshop in the rural town of Romsey, knowledge of the war is limited to the rumours that reach the local inn.

When a stranger knocks on his door one night and informs him that the king’s cryptographer has died, everything changes. Aware of Thomas’s background as a mathematician and his expertise in codes and ciphers, the king has summoned him to his court in Oxford.

On arrival, Thomas soon discovers that nothing at court is straightforward. There is evidence of a traitor in their midst. Brutal murder follows brutal murder. And when a vital message encrypted with a notoriously unbreakable code is intercepted, he must decipher it to reveal the king’s betrayer and prevent the violent death that failure will surely bring.

The King’s Spy is the second Civil War novel I’ve read as part of the Transworld Historical Fiction Reading Challenge. And while both novels contain Royalist viewpoints – though neither are wholly so – they each give a totally different view of the proceedings. The Bleeding Land, the other novel mentioned, is far more focused on the visceral reality of the battles and motivations of the Civil War, on what it meant for people not in power and how the Civil War affected families and communities. While we also see Thomas torn from his family by a summons from the King to Oxford and he does see battle, the Civil War is far less central to the story. Instead, it is the backdrop against which Swanston is able to set his mystery. And it’s not just this that differs; there are also differences in characterisation. For example, Prince Rupert, who in The Bleeding Land is a courageous, though rather cavalier, figure who is admired by the protagonist, in The King’s Spy is a dissolute and does the King’s cause more harm than good with his subjects. Similarly, the soldiers are mostly portrayed as knaves and profiteers, who destroy the once beautiful and peaceful town of Oxford, while in The Bleeding Land the view is far more balanced and probably even leaning towards the positive. It’s interesting to see such different treatments of the same era, though ultimately it doesn’t really affect how the stories are judged.

The narrative centres around an interesting mystery – who is the traitor in the King’s court and behind the murders that plague it – that has to be solved by decrypting coded messages that have been intercepted, which is where Thomas comes in, but the book had some flaws. These come mostly in the form of major info dumps, somewhat disguised as Thomas giving lectures on en- and decryption to interested characters. While the necessity to convey the information to the reader is clear, after the first or second time, it started to feel inelegant. My complete density when it comes to mathematics probably didn’t help in this respect as decryption relies heavily on mathematical acumen to function and I rather felt a little boggled by the explanations at times. What is cool is that the encrypted texts are included in the text along with some of the tables Thomas uses, so if a reader was so minded, they could have a go at decrypting the texts themselves, at least the easier ones. Obviously, I’m not such a reader, but that the option is there is great.

Thomas as a protagonist was a good character though; he’s likeable, intelligent and well-motivated. The one thing in his arc I did have my doubts at was his relationship with Lady Jane Romilly. This seems to run pretty deep after only a few meetings and also seemed a little socially unbalanced. I can’t imagine an attendant lady of the Queen having time for a man who is essentially a rather obscure tradesman, even if currently employed by the king. Another thing that bugged me was the way Thomas finally cracks the crucial message’; in a rather ‘A Beautiful Mind’-esque scene, the answer just comes to him. It struck me as odd, but this might be mostly due to the fact that I immediately linked the visual description to A Beautiful Mind, which is one of my favourite films (yes, Paul Bettanny and Russell Crowe, I just can’t help myself. I even love Master and Commander as a result!) His main sparring partner, Father Simon de Pointz, a Franciscan friar part of the Queen’s Household, is an entertaining character and a good foil for the more serious and scholarly Thomas. I liked their interactions and the surprising depths to this rather worldly ecclesiastic.

Overall, The King’s Spy is an enjoyable book, with definite merits and I’d be interested to read more about Thomas and Father Simon de Pointz. I’d love to see how Swanston develops his writing style and see whether he can move away from the infodumpy lectures, while keeping the cryptographer angle that makes Thomas so intriguing. This first outing for Thomas Hill was a good read, but there is definite room for growth.

This book was provided for review by the publisher as part of the Transworld Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

AD 68. The tyrant Nero has no son and no heir.

Suddenly there’s the very real possibility that Rome might become a republic once more. But the ambitions of a few are about to bring corruption, chaos and untold bloodshed to the many.

Among them is a hero of the campaign against Boudicca, Aulus Caecina Severus. Caught up in a conspiracy to overthrow Caesar’s dynasty, he commits treason, raises a rebellion, faces torture and intrigue – all supposedly for the good of Rome. However, the boundary between such selflessness and self-preservation is far from clear, and keeping to the dangerous path he’s chosen requires all Severus’ skills as a cunning soldier and increasingly deft politician.

And so Severus looks back on the dark and dangerous time that history remembers as ‘The Year of the Four Emperors’, and recalls the part he, and those around him, played – for good or ill – in plunging the mighty Roman Empire into anarchy and civil war…

When in Rome… But in 68 AD Rome is far larger than the modern metropolis and there is a huge difference between the philosophical ideal of Rome and the reality of Rome, so doing what the Romans do has become far less attractive than it should have been. With all of what is wrong with Rome and Roman politics and society embodied in the latest heir of Julius Caesar to sit the throne, it is inevitable that before long a conspiracy rises to depose Nero and put a more deserving man on the throne, one who’ll take Rome back to what she should be. But who should sit that throne? In The Last Caesar we discover that that question isn’t so easily answered and that which was given by the Senate and the legions, can just as quickly be taken away.

The Last Caesar is told as a memoir by Aulus Caecina Severus or Caecina as he is known to his friends. It’s not just a memoir, it’s an apologia, written by Caecina to explain, and in some measure justify, his conduct during the events told in the book. As a consequence, he often breaks the fourth wall and addresses his reader directly. While I enjoyed these breaches, since they give glimpses of the older Caecina and his sense of self and humour, they might not work for everyone, especially if you’re expecting a straight narration. Because this is written as a memoir, the book is told in first person, which lends the narrative an immediacy and intimacy that compensate for the lack of tension as regards the safety of our main character, since we know he’ll survive whatever is thrown at him, as he’s there to tell the story. Caecina is a likeable fellow, who balances his sense of honour and duty with a healthy dose of self-interest and isn’t above playing the system, as is illustrated by his essentially committing fraud as a Quaestor to finance his later career, because it’s the done thing. I especially enjoyed his time spent among Vindex’s Gauls, in which his world is turned upside-down, not just by what he has to do, but by the realisation he’s come to care for some of these ‘barbarians’, who in any other circumstance would have been either beneath his notice or his enemy.

Caecina is surrounded by a varied cast of secondary characters, my favourites of which were Quintus Vindex, the old Vindex himself and Totavalas. Quintus is so young when Caecina first meets him and has to do so much growing up in a relatively short time. He turns into a good man, a loyal friend and a good leader and I loved seeing him grow. The older Vindex may not have been such a positive figure in the book, but I loved how Venmore-Rowland portrayed him as a man balancing between two cultures, wanting to belong to the new one and at the same time having a hard time letting go of the old. He’s a man who desperately wants to be better than he is, to be capable of things he just can’t manage and in trying to prove he can do them anyway makes some horrible decisions. Despite his actions, I don’t think Venmore-Rowland portrays him as evil, just misguided and incompetent. Then again, there are many more people who will lose their lives to misguidedness and incompetence than to true evil. Totavalas just stole my heart with his dry humour and his unbreakable spirit. He seems so accepting of his fate as a slave, but at the same time he isn’t afraid to speak his mind and contradict his master.

Venmore-Rowland writes some very cool battle scenes, both using Roman tactics and Celtic/Gaul ones and deftly intertwines political strands with the straight-up military decisions. The Last Caesar is very much a political beast populated by politicians of both the honourable and the not-so-honourable kind. Politics in Rome were a life-and-death affair and seemingly never more so than in the period covered in The Last Caesar. So while I enjoyed Venmore-Rowland’s battle scenes, it is in the political arena where this narrative shines. The book is filled with conspiracy, double-crosses, triple-crosses, betrayal and lies, but also with courage, friendship, loyalty and love. The author juggles all of these expertly, never dropping any of them and occasionally bringing elements back into play that completely change the pattern he’s weaving in the air.

My one gripe with the book was its ending. The story seems to end in medias res, though the cut-off point seems logical if this was the first of a sequence of books. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find out if this is the first in a series or whether it is a standalone. I do hope it’s the first in a series as Caecina’s story doesn’t seem finished and I’d love to be able to return to the world of this novel. Venmore-Rowland has managed to write an engaging debut novel and I look forward to seeing how he grows in his craft, as this first taste is very promising. The Last Caesar is a book about Romans, but not Rome and I loved its focus on the edges of the Empire, even if these edges influenced the heart in a major way. If you’ve an interest in the Roman Empire, this is a historical novel well worth your time.

This book was provided for review by the publisher as part of the Transworld Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

England 1642: a nation divided.
England is at war with itself. King Charles and Parliament each gather soldiers to their banners. Across the land men prepare to fight for their religious and political ideals. Civil war has begun.

A family ripped asunder.
The Rivers are landed gentry, and tradition dictates that their allegiance is to the King. Sir Francis’s loyalty to the crown and his desire to protect his family will test them all. As the men march to war, so the women are left to defend their home against a ruthless enemy. Just as Edmund, the eldest of Sir Francis’ sons, will do his duty, so his brother Tom will turn his back on all he once believed in…

A war that will change everything.
From the raising of the King’s Standard at Nottingham to the butchery and blood of Edgehill, Edmund and Tom Rivers will each learn of honour, sacrifice, hatred and betrayal as they follow their chosen paths through this most savage of wars.

Heartbreaking, harrowing, visceral, inescapable, detailed, stunning, gorgeous and riveting. Those are some of the first words that sprang to mind after finishing Giles Kristian’s The Bleeding Land. I’m having a good reading year historical fiction-wise and this book was another highlight. Kristian takes his reader along on an adventure and while you know, overall, how it’s going to end – this is historical fiction after all – I found myself holding my breath at key scenes, hoping against hope that things would turn out differently. If that isn’t a testament to the author’s skill, I couldn’t think of a better one.

The Bleeding Land opens on the fields at Edgehill, just before the first pitched battle of the English Civil War in October 1642. To me the Civil War was only some lines in my history books, something which led to the execution of King Charles I, the Commonwealth and to the Protectorate led by Oliver Cromwell, to an era in which Puritan morals led to the closing of theatres and a forced conforming of the Arts to their strict world view. With The Bleeding Land, Kristian made the era come alive for me, made it three-dimensional and took it beyond the political reasons behind the War to the motivations of the people not in power who fought its battles.

There are three components that make The Bleeding Land such a fantastic read: its characters, the battle descriptions and Kristian’s carefully woven prose. Of course the plot is exciting enough in its own right, but it’s these three things that lift it up to something extraordinary. To start off with the last element I named, the prose in this book. Kristian chooses his words carefully and – according to the Author’s Note – strives to both reflect the language and tone of his chosen era, but at the same time keep the text accessible to modern-day readers. An example of this is his use of the verb gnar, which means to snarl or to growl; I’d never encountered this word before, but understood it immediately and it fit the narrative perfectly. Gnar was used relatively often, but other words weren’t used as extensively, but were dropped in and added just that right touch to remind the reader that this is a different era and the language spoken quite different from ours. Kristian’s writing is evocative and I found myself shivering on the couch at the freezing weather in the book even if we’re currently having the hottest week so far this summer.

Kristian’s evocative prose is at its most graphic in the battle scenes contained in the narrative. They are visceral and harrowing. Don’t look for descriptions depicting battle as glorious and honour-filled, no, Kristian shows us the fear the men feel just before going into battle, the way their bowels turn runny and panic sours the gullet; the way that once the charge has started, it’s either kill or be killed and you don’t have time to have scruples about killing a man; the way that after the battle, after you’ve come down from the adrenaline rush it invokes, you’re haunted by memories of what you’ve witnessed; and how there is nothing glorious about death in battle. He writes this so well you can almost smell the stink of the battlefield and hear the ear-deafening noise that accompanies a pitched fight. Kristian also seems to know what he’s doing with regards to the weapons used and how they can be used and as regards the choreography of a fight, as you will, the natural ebb and flow of it and the strategies that were used, which makes it all the more convincing.

The last leg of Kristian’s tripod is his characterisation. Not just or even mainly the Rivers family, but also those we catch glimpses of briefly and those that surround the different Rivers’ children. The story is told from the points of view of Mun (Edmund), Bess (Elizabeth) and Tom (Thomas) Rivers, the three children of Sir Francis and his wife Mary. They each have their own tale to tell, Mun is a staunch Royalist and fights for the King in an elite horse troop, while Bess and their mother have to fight to protect their home, Shear House, from the rebels who want to take it. Tom chooses to fight on the Parliamentarians’ side, not from a deep-seated conviction that they are right, but because they oppose everything that he hates and give him a chance at vengeance. They are each given believable motivations, sympathetic qualities, flaws and interesting conflicts to resolve; in short they’re complete characters. Of the three, Tom is was my least favourite, not because he chose the ‘wrong’ side, but because he made his choices from a place I found it hard to connect to, that deep a rage and hatred is something not many people will experience. In contrast, Mun and Bess were easier to connect to, Mun because of his sense of duty and Bess, because of her loving nature and her circumstances during the siege of Shear House.

With The Bleeding Land Giles Kristian has opened up a whole new era of British history, which has been largely unexplored in historical fiction, and shown that it was more than a political schism that tore the land, it tore families, lovers and friends apart and divided them sometimes right down the middle. It was a painful time, but also a formative one. The Bleeding Land is a stunning opening to what promises to be a fascinating trilogy and I can’t wait to see how the Rivers family will deal with the consequences of events from this book. This was my first experience with Kristian’s writing, but hopefully it won’t be my last, I’ll be keeping my eyes out for his Raven books and for the next books in this new trilogy. The Bleeding Land comes highly recommended and was definitely one of the best reads of the year so far.

This book was provided for review by the publisher as part of the Transworld Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.