When Kate Sedley completed her series with The Christmas Wassail, I decided it was time to return to the start of the series. Roger changed quite a bit over the 12 or 13 year timeline of his books. In December 1483, Roger Chapman is married with four children with Bristol as his home base and a reputation for aiding Richard III. That's a far cry from 19-year-old Roger Carverson who recently left Glastonbury Abbey knowing that monastic life wasn't for him. That Roger is bright and curious but somewhat naive. Naive, but tall and handsome and it's his attractiveness that brings him to the attention of Alderman Weaver's housekeeper/cousin and to Lady Mallory's servant Bess. Relatives of both Alderman Weaver and Lady Mallory disappeared from the same street in London and both want Roger to find out what happened, which he does. 28 years after my first reading, I'd forgotten this main mystery in favor of the subplot which brings Roger in contact with the Duke of Gloucester and his spymaster, Timothy Plummer. While chasing a false lead in the disappearances, Roger finds out where Anne Neville had been hidden in an attempt to prevent her marriage to Richard. I have hundreds of books (read and unread) on my shelves, but I'm going to make time to revisit Roger's travels.
Sunday, July 24, 2022
In the Shadow of Vesuvius
In the Shadow of Vesuvius brings Tasha Alexander's Lady Emily, along with her childhood friends Ivy Brandon and Jeremy, Duke of Bainbridge, to an archaeological dig in 1901 Pompeii. As so often happens, they come across a much more recently deceased body and find that most of the archeological expedition (including a brother and sister team - she's the archaeologist and he's an artist who draws the uncovered artifacts - the head archaeologist, and the man financing it) are hiding secrets. Another more personal secret turns up as well, in the form of Emily's husband Colin's previously unknown daughter. Fighting jealousy and the feelings of inadequacy Colin's late lover induced in her years ago, Emily eventually uncovers the truth, and saves herself with the aid of a knife carried by the young woman poet whose life in Pompeii shortly before Vesuvius destroyed the city.
In a Dark House
Sometimes, a mystery novel has too much plot. That's my opinion of Deborah Crombie's In a Dark House but I still found it entertaining. The book starts with a young firefighter chatting with her colleague before they're called out on an arson fire. You can feel their friendship and romantic potential, so it's not a surprise when he dies during the fire. He's not the only casualty - there's a woman's body on the ground floor - and Duncan Kincaid leads the police investigation. Meanwhile, Duncan's cousin, a Cambridge based vicar who's covering for one of her colleagues, asks Gemma James to come along on a welfare check of one of her parishoners. Fanny Liu is a former nurse now disabled by Guillaume-Beret and her flatmate, who also helps her with daily activities has disappeared. There's also a missing child case and a murder connected to the battered women's shelter adjacent to the fire site, and all plots end up being at least loosely connected. It's not the best mystery I've read, but Crombie's characters are engaging and feel like real people and each individual solution is well supported. In a Dark House is a bit too convoluted to be a good mystery but it works as a novel.
Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System
I loved Quincy. I still do - one advantage of working from home has been the chance to watch it over lunch. 70s fashion, Quincy jumping up on his soapbox - and scientific crime investigation. It turns out that most techniques (even fingerprints) range from "more art than science" to "totally false." Entertaining, but ineffective at best, and putting the wrong people behind bars (or into the execution chamber) all too often.
M. Chris Fabricant, an attorney with the Innocence Project, details the convictions and exonerations of three men in Junk Science. All three were convicted on the basis of bite marks. They're inherently unreliable evidence (as any older sibling of a biter can tell you, two bites from the same person are not identical, let alone distinctive), and one particular "expert" invented a method of "finding" bite marks to match to previously identified suspects. Beyond the injustice done to these three men, there's the fact that in at least one case, the actual criminal committed additional serious crimes while the scapegoat was in prison.
While his stories were interesting, Fabricant could have used a better editor. He jumps between cases, adding in personal information about his case preparations, without much warning and without an index that would let the reader refresh their memory about the details of each case. Junk Science is worth reading if you're interested in the subject, but likely too frustrating to get through if you're not.