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: #521861 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

The Times
'Supremely juicy'

Sunday Mirror
'Full of energy and inventiveness'

Customer Reviews

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.

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.