Product Description

It is New Year's Day 1755 and Nathaniel Hopson, journeyman to the famous cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale, finds himself drawn into a chilling affair. While working at the country home of Lord Montfort, Nathaniel discovers his patron shot dead in his magnificent new library. The conclusion seems obvious: burdened with gambling debts and recently possessed of a melancholic nature, Montfort must have taken his own life, but Nathaniel is not convinced. While the gun near Montfort's hand suggests suicide, what of the blood on the windowsill and the confusion of footprints on the library floor? And there is another strange detail: the small, elaborately carved box of rare grenadillo wood clutched in the aristocrat's lifeless hand. No sooner has Nathaniel been set up as a most unlikely investigator than another body is found, frozen and cruelly mutilated. Nathaniel's detachment is shattered. He knows the victim well - but what was he doing on Montfort's country estate? Nathaniel's investigation will take him from palatial drawing rooms to the slums of Fleet Street and London's Foundling Hospital, where the identity of a child abandoned twenty years ago may hold the key to the mystery. But someone has already killed to keep this secret and each step Nathaniel takes on his journey is a step further into danger. As intricately crafted as a Chippendale cabinet, THE GRENADILLO BOX is both an utterly irresistible detective story and a vibrant recreation of eighteenth-century England, and marks the fiction debut of this supremely accomplished writer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #285610 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Grenadillo Box is Janet Gleeson first foray into novel writing, her last two books, The Arcanum and The Moneymaker, were Coditude-style micro-histories of porcelain and the inventor of paper money. Gleeson has not completely abandoned the past, however; this is an atmospheric 18th-century whodunnit. It begins à la Agatha Christie with a mysterious death in a library and eventually concludes, in true Poirot fashion, with our detective explaining his deductions in the very same library. (A further ingenious genealogical twist is reserved until the final pages.)

Nathaniel Hopson, a journeyman to the great cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale, is employed to install a new library in Horsehearth Hall, the Cambridgeshire seat of the cantankerous Lord Montfort. On the evening of its completion the obnoxious Montfort is found dead. His corpse is covered in leeches but he appears to have been shot and an elegantly carved wooden box lays by his side. With vast gambling debts it is assumed that he has committed suicide to prevent his creditor Lord Foley gaining control of the estate. Hobson (and Foley) are not so sure. After stumbling on the mutilated corpse of his colleague John Partridge (the man who designed the library) in a frozen pond nearby, Hobson is convinced Montfort was murdered. Could Partridge, a foundling, have had some claim to Montfort's fortune? How are Partridge, Montfort, Chippendale and Foley all connected to the Italian actress Madame Trenti? And just why is Chippendale so desperate to recover a series of drawings from Montfort's library? Although loosely based on real incidents and bolstered with plenty of authentic detail (Gleeson was a once a Sotheby's antique expert) this novel often resorts to some fairly hoary melodramatic conceits along the way. Hobson and cohorts, for example, seem to discover an extraordinary number of conveniently illuminating long lost letters. The dialogue doesn't always ring true, though there are a pleasing smattering of "I was a lusty one and twenty years" and more than a couple of wonderfully bawdy Boswell-isms. Despite its flaws this is still an immensely enjoyable historical detective yarn. --Travis Elborough

Review
Nathaniel Hopson, the hero of this story, worked as a journeyman cabinet maker for Thomas Chippendale. Gleeson has taken the real character, cast him as an early detective and spun a fascinating murder mystery around his trade and friends. The whole of the first-person narrative is written in the style of the 18th century without any discernible lapses into modern dialogue and description. This brings alive the clatter of carriages and the seedy, unsanitary alleys and thoroughfares of London. From there we are taken to a country house of the period and into elegant rooms lost in chilly draughts and gloomy candlelight where the curmudgeonly, dislikeable Lord Montfort is apparently murdered. To his astonishment, Hopson's friend and fellow journeyman, Partridge, whom he believed to be in London, is next found murdered and mysteriously mutilated the following morning. Hopson seeks to find his killer of his friend, the maker of the exquisite and intriguing Grenadillo Box. Lord Foley, a guest of the Montforts, wants to know how his host died, to enable him to claim a gambling debt as his due. The two unite to investigate the deaths and thereafter the story unfolds in often surprising ways. The research is impeccable, whether describing clothing, architecture or the skills of cabinet making. Thomas Chippendale is depicted as frustrated by lack of the artistic appreciation he believes is his due, as a shrewd businessman and one capable of cruelty and jealousy of his employees. It is a very rounded characterization and utterly convincing. As detectives, Nathaniel, Alice, the lady he loves, and his unwanted mentor Lord Foley are not always very intelligent. The final denouement is somewhat obvious several chapters before the end and Nathaniel spends too much reviewing the evidence. Despite this distraction, the faultless historical perspective carries the reader willingly to the end. (Kirkus UK)

The bloody death of a peer draws in a rambunctious but thoroughly intelligent young cabinetmaker. Gleeson's 1999 nonfiction, The Arcanum, was a detailed look at 18th-century Europe's development of the porcelain industry. Clearly comfortable in and deeply knowledgeable about that era, Gleeson applies a rich veneer of similar detail to a pre-police procedural. In this case the proto-cop is Nathaniel Hopson, a lusty lad nearing the end of his apprenticeship to socially and professionally ambitious master cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale. Sent by Chippendale to complete the installation of a lavishly carved library in Horseheath Hall, seat of the irritable Lord Montfort near Cambridge, Hopson is pressed into service as an emergency footman at a dinner Montfort throws to show off the gorgeous new bookshelves. In the middle of dinner a shot rings out. Stumbling into the darkened library, tripping over clues and red herrings, Hopson discovers the bloody corpse of Lord Montfort. Montfort, whose gambling debts to dinner guest Lord Foley may impoverish his widow and son, appears to have taken his own life. But the fatal pistol is in the wrong place, there are leeches mysteriously attached to his neck, a beautifully carved little box in his hand, bloody square-toed footprints leading to a window, and buckets of blood on the window sill. Hopson is blessed with innate skills of mechanical deconstruction, and he begins at once to deconstruct the death scene, leading Lord Foley to enlist his help in sorting out the various queernesses that are complicated by the discovery of the body of Hopson's fellow apprentice and recently missing best friend John Partridge frozen in a nearby pond. Hopson's detection will involve the lovely manager of a luxury-wood works, throw him into the messy lives of his betters, and irritate the already grumpy but not yet legendary Mr. Chippendale. The mystery at the heart feels lifted from an early Christie or Sayers, but the period detail is rich and pleasantly distracting. (Kirkus Reviews)

Sunday Mirror
'Full of energy and inventiveness'

Customer Reviews

Pulp detective novel in badly fitting 18thC costume
This is a very ordinary detective novel first and foremost. The plot, transposed into 20th / 21st would probably not make it past the publisher's in-tray. The fact that its shoe-horned into Georgian England doesn't make it much better in my view. What I found most disappointing was the flipping between 18th century speech patterns and more modern ones. Its the prose equivalent of a 18th Century character in a film listening to their iPod on screen. I didn't find any of the characterisations to be believable. I thought the narrative was inelegant. If you like authors like Griffin and Palliser you should steer well clear of this.

A wonderful read
This book was recommended to me by a friend and although I'm a modern murder and thriller reader normally, I decided to give it a go - and I'm so glad I did.

Janet Gleeson has brought the 18th century vividly to life with her descriptions of not only the scenery and smells (and yes there are occasions when you really can smell things!) but also the social niceties of the day. The hero for instance due to his station in life is not allowed to question statments made by a Lord, even when they are patently wrong as it is 'not his place' to do so. This makes the murder mystery even more intriguing as many things we would take for granted that you could do nowadays, were closed off to him during his investigations.

The description of travelling on top of a carriage in the snow whilst the other travellers were inside with their feet buried in straw to keep them warm, made be glad to be alive today! There are many other descriptions of everyday life of which I was totally unaware so this book has educated as well as entertained me.

This book is unputdownable and I thoroughly recommend it.