Mistress of the Art of Death

by Ariana Franklin | Mystery & Thrillers |
ISBN: 0425219259 Global Overview for this book
Registered by BooksandMusic of Seattle, Washington USA on 6/9/2010
Buy from one of these Booksellers:
Amazon.com | Amazon UK | Amazon CA | Amazon DE | Amazon FR | Amazon IT | Bol.com
2 journalers for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by BooksandMusic from Seattle, Washington USA on Wednesday, June 9, 2010
A child has been murdered in Cambridge and 3 more are missing. The Jews of Cambridge have been blamed for the murder of the child and the local nuns have taken the body, boiled it down to bones, declared the child a saint and are charging pennies to touch a bone and be healed. Wow. In the meantime the Jews are hiding in the Castle where they have been given protection much to the anger of the townspeople. King Henry II contacts the King of Sicily requesting an investigator and a forensic doctor to find who is really killing children in Cambridge, after all he is losing money with his Jews locked up in the castle unable to do business. Good premise, right?
Despite that, when I first started reading it and found that the book started with grotesque violence and then King Henry II in 1170 says words like "ain't" and "reckon", I thought to myself, this isn't literature, it isn't Scottish either, it's... But the mystery pulled me in. I had my suspicions about who was committing the crimes and I turned out to be somewhat right, but I wasn't positive and I really wanted to know. The mystery part of this novel was well-done, suspenseful and well-plotted. It made me forgive the inconsistencies of the speech of the characters. After all, if it had been written in the words spoken at the time I probably would not have understood it at all. I liked the characterization, each person felt well-drawn to me and fascinating in their own way. I also thought the historical information was interesting and appreciated that the author guides us through what historical liberties she took, and what was taken from history, in her author's note at the end.

Journal Entry 2 by BooksandMusic at Seattle, Washington USA on Sunday, June 13, 2010

Released 13 yrs ago (6/13/2010 UTC) at Seattle, Washington USA

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

I sent it via Goodreads bookswap to a reader in Illinois who had requested it.

Journal Entry 3 by wingAnonymousFinderwing at Homewood, Illinois USA on Sunday, August 15, 2010
What do you get when you combine 12th century British history and CSI? You get Ariana Franklin's series about Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar! Mistress of the Art of Death is the first book in the series, though I read the second book, The Serpent's Tale first. I'm just wacky like that sometimes!


The Mistress of the Art of Death is set in Henry II's England. In Cambridge, four children have been murdered, and the Catholic majority have decided that it is the city's Jews that are the culprits. Now, Henry may not really care about religion or tolerance, but he does like the money that he gets from his Jewish merchants, so he orders the Jews brought into the castle in Cambridge for their protection, and sends away to the King of Sicily and his famous medical college in Salerno for a "master of the art of death"-a doctor who understands how to get information from a corpse. Instead, he gets Adelia and her Saracen manservant. Forced to pretend that the Saracen is the doctor or be accused of witchcraft, Adelia makes it her mission to find the killer who tortured these children-and it was not anyone from the Jewish community. She has a long list of suspects, but has trouble narrowing it down until an outbreak of cholera in Cambridge, when Adelia notices the clue that leads to the exciting conclusion. Adelia isn't the only one that Henry has on the case-he also has his "fixer", Sir Rowly, undercover as a tax collector, investigating the murders, and together these unlikely partners bring justice to the killer.


I read a lot of mysteries. For a while, when I was a young single mother, that's all I read, because I got them for free from my own mother. As a result, it's pretty hard to find a plot twist that really surprises me. Usually I have figured out the answer long before the end. Not so with either of Franklin's books. As with The Serpent's Tale, I was pleasantly in the dark about whodunit, and that made the reveal so much more exciting!


But, while I appreciate Franklin's ability to surprise me, what I love most about her books is the way she uses Adelia and her scientific skepticism to explore the state of the world during the Crusades. Adelia finds 12th century England a barbarous place, where superstition rules over reason and the church uses fake miracles and old bones in reliquaries to control the population. The Church definitely comes in for scrutiny in this novel, but Franklin makes sure to show that it is the hypocrisy, superstition, and intolerance that Adelia finds wrong, not religious faith itself. Rowley's account of his time in the Holy Land brings a clarity to what it was like in that part of the world, with Jews and Christians and Muslims all vying for control of the same sacred location-and the resources available there! Franklin even makes a connection between the treatment of the Muslims in the Crusades with the rise of something new, called Islam, which seems to mirror something of our own time. This smart, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic mystery is also a smart, funny, tragic history lesson-and well worth the time to read it!

Are you sure you want to delete this item? It cannot be undone.