Product Description

In Cambridge a child has been hideously murdered and other children have disappeared. The Jews, made scapegoats by the all-powerful Christian clergy, have been forced to retreat into the castle to avoid slaughter by angry townspeople. Henry, King of England, is displeased. The Jews provide a large part of his revenue and therefore the real killer must be found, and quickly. A renowned investigator, Simon of Naples, is recruited and he arrives in town from the continent accompanied by an Arab and a young woman, Adelia Aguilar. There are few female doctors in twelth century Europe, but Adelia is one of them, having qualified at the great School of Medicine in Salerno. What's more, her speciality is the study of corpses; she is, in fact, a mistress of the art of death, a skill that must be concealed in case she's accused of witchcraft.Adelia's investigation takes her deep into Cambridge, its castle and convents and in a medieval city teeming with life, Adelia makes friends and even finds romance. And, fatally, the attention of a murderer who is prepared to kill again...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1057327 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

JOANNE HARRIS, August 06
'Entertaining, well researched and well written'

Joanne Harris
Entertaining, well researched and well written.

NY Times
"a morbidly entertaining novel"

Customer Reviews

Abandon all hope of historical accuracy...and you might enjoy it
On the one hand I enjoyed this novel very much. Ariana Franklin is a consummate story teller and her characters and the setting in which they act and react are wonderfully realised. You can actually believe you are there with them in the world she has built. There are some delightfully realised secondary personages. I was particularly fond of eelwife Gytha and her cheeky urchin son, Ulf. Henry II is spot on and I really warmed to Ariana Franklin's version of this fiercely intelligent king with his mingling of imperious authority and mischievous common touch - Bravo! It's a page turner, no doubt about it and for all the above reasons I would be glad to give it five stars.
However.... Abandon all hope of historical veracity ye who enter here. There are the usual detail errors that irk me because I know my 12th century and further irk me because the author claims on her website that she is historically accurate. I think not! Mention of brandy and laudanum which were not available in that century - so therefore some of the scenes could never have happened. Three Angevin lions when there were only two until the early 1190's. Costume errors. Sometimes it was more like reading about Chaucer's Pilgrims than the Becket bunch. Images such as Henry II talking about his billiard table (conjures a hilarious image of Henry with his cue in hand leaning over a table in the smoky fug of a bar!) or having his head referred to as a cannon ball, yanked me straight out of the story. There are errors peppered throughout the novel both the large and the small, of detail and of mindset.
The heroine is a woman of 21st century sensibilities, who also acts like a 21st century TV forensic expert. There's a moment when she comes to examine her first victim when she garbs herself in the medieval equivalent of scrubs (!) and with an assistant to write down the findings with chalk and slate begins speaking in a monotone. 'The remains of a young female. Some fair hair still attached to the skull...' At this point I burst out laughing because it was so preposterous. The author tells us that Salerno had a body farm where pigs were killed and buried in different circumstances and seasons so that the students could observe the various states of decay. This again caused this reader much mirth. I doubt that Salerno and the teachings of the Trotula were quite on this wavelength. I have the kind of mind that gets hung up on practicalities and is constantly asking 'Would this really have happened?' At the beginning of the novel, Adelia saves the life of a prior by draining his swollen bladder using a straw catheter. Said prior then makes a full and complete recovery and is a perky, helpful chap as the novel continues. But to have that condition in the first place speaks of serious underlying problems. So to have him one moment dying of a blocked bladder and the next fit as a flea and back to normal just doesn't ring true.
The best way to read this book if you are at all sensitive about historical veracity, is to lock up your disbelief before you begin reading and throw away the key. Make a pact to ignore the blurbs about 'well researched', treat Ariana Franklin's medieval Cambridge as an alternative world and you will really enjoy this novel. I give this 10 out of 10 for characterisation, atmosphere and page turning quality, 6 out of 10 for the mystery element which was entertaining but a bit weak in places, and 3 out of 10 for historical accuracy - mainly because she gets Henry II correct (apart from aforementioned billiards, the reference to cannon balls and the surplus lion on his shield which really needs to wait until his son Richard has been to Cyprus. His character is good though). Three stars I think to average things out.

Bit of a slow starter but really quite good
I decided to give this one a go after becoming addicted to another series set in medieval Cambridge, the Chronicles of Matthew Bartholomew by Susanna Gregory. After enjoying the Bartholomew Chronicles so much, this book was always going to have its work cut out to come anywhere near competing. Having just finished it - I am happy to say that it does! The author's research into the period is clearly infallible and the fenland town is recreated for the reader in vivid and accurate detail.

There are some really enjoyable characters in the book and the character development of the leading lady is superb.

I am reluctant to give this book less than five stars because the end product itself is brilliant. However, I gave it four purely for the fact that it did take me quite a bit of effort to get into it. It starts at a fairly steady pace and takes a quite a while to get warmed up and drag the reader into the main thrust of the story.

However, I would urge any other readers that find this to stick with it and see the book through as it is an amazing story and well worth the initial ground work of the first few chapters.

I will defiantly be purchasing Franklin's next venture with Adelia.

England, 1171, millitant feminist solves crime for the Daily Mail.
Mistress of the Art of Death


Ah. A historical novel, I thought, I'll enjoy this one. Well, that thought lasted for about half a page. I have to say I hated this book. For me, it exemplified every aspect of a bad historical novel.

Actually, I am loath to call this a historical novel. A pseudo-historical novel would be more accurate. Adelia is a modern day militant feminist dressed up in medieval clothes. She is educated, rejects male protection and by the way, happens to know dirt causes sickness (a mere eight hundred and fifty years before Florence Nightingale). In case this wasn't enough, she runs with a couple of fellows multicultural enough to satisfy any Minister of Equality. The choice of a happy trio from a Benneton ad for our heroes leads me on to the next aspect that stuck firmly in my gullet!!

This novel won an award. But, on closer inspection I found that the award was for historical accuracy, nothing to do with literary merit. And, granted, the medieval details were impressive but they were merely tacked on to a very modern story. Quick, change props and we're in the back streets of the East End in Victorian London, change again and we're walking amongst Roman soldiers in St Albans. What was lacking was any sense of authenticity, any sense that this was actually a medieval story, a story driven by the beliefs of the time: beliefs that would be held not only by the villains of the piece but also by our heroine.

This author is an ex-journalist and it shows. The story reads like a shock expose from a tabloid newspaper. Oh, horrific child murders; read about the evil killers; exclusive details of children's agonising last moments. Add to this the preachy PC dogma of let's not be nasty to Jews or Muslim and we have a tabloid dream. The author presents to us a story either composed in her own hypocrisy or in anticipation of ours.

I couldn't help but compare this novel to `The Lovely Bones'. Both novels deal with child murder, both are shocking in their way, but the novels differ considerably in their approach to the subject. In this novel, the author uses the murdered children simply as a salacious prop on which to hang her predicable whodoneit. She dehumanises them in a way that I found both gratuitous and offensive. In complete contrast, the author of `The Lovely Bones' succeeds in the exact opposite: she gives the victim back her humanity and the story she reveals rises above the tawdry details of killing and death and speaks to us of the immortality of love.

To sum up, this was a nasty piece of commercial writing. I was neither enlightened nor entertained and I will certainly scrutinize more closely the exact criteria of `literary awards' in the future.