Author: Susie Helme

John Biggins, The Lion Ascendant (Bonanova Editions 2021)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58835259-the-lion-ascendant?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_18

Flemish surgeon’s apprentice Frans Michielszoon van Raveck enters the Polish-Swedish War 1626-29 War in the service of King Gustav.
Biggins’ ‘fascination with… the pathology of decaying empires’, as claimed in his author’s bio, is evident throughout. Frans’ life story reads like a comedy of errors, as he assists in one bumbled project after another.
Over-wintering on a frozen hummock on the Vistula River, Frans becomes assistant to an Italian architect charged by King Gustav to construct an over-priced fortress and sluice-gates. He earns a medical scholarship by successfully operating on the Swedish king, studying at a miserably equipped university in Uppsala. In Stockholm he assists in the construction of the ill-fated folly, the Vasa warship, which sank less than a mile into her maiden voyage.
Peppered with Classical and Biblical references, the writing admits to having ‘drunk deep at the spring of Pericles [and] Cicero’. It is a rich, erudite style which is very much to my taste. Even apart from the frequent vocabulary in Dutch, Polish, Swedish and Latin, I found almost 20 words I have never before seen in usage, such as ‘obloquy’, ‘clyster’ and ‘gallipot’.
In places the language is so flowery as to be humorous. For example, a fellow who doesn’t love Amsterdam ‘would certainly starve in the midst of Dame Abundantia’s larder and lack salt to his boiled egg beside the very brine pans of Cadiz’. The language is believable for the 17th century, something which I consider essential for historical fiction.
The slow pace also speaks to period verisimilitude, when travellers trekked across endless frozen meadows with no map and soldiers waited months for orders never being told the overall battle objective.
This is Biggins’ 6th novel. This is the sequel to The Surgeon’s Apprentice and ends with Frans travelling, so we can expect Volume III.
Review first appeared in The Historical Novels Review.

Catherine Clarke, The Only Living Lady Parachutist (Idle Fancy Press 2021)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58421074-the-only-living-lady-parachutist?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_33

The true tale of a woman reaching the heights (pun intended) of her profession, with some tall tales told to whip up the crowd

Lillian reminisces upon her entry into show business—the Music Hall world of acrobats, jugglers, trapezists, upon which she gazed with envy from her barmaid job at the pub next door.
Ted Faust gives her an audition, as a trapezist—and a stage name, Gladys Freitas—only to find that he proposes charging her, ‘for lessons’. Eventually, she becomes ‘the Aerial Queen’, lauded by the Sydney Herald, as trapeze artists say, ‘with the world at her feet’.
Her debut at Haymarket Music Hall, despite her mother’s disparaging that she had become ‘an actress’, is a success. Sister Ruby wants to form a double act. Despite a prickle of resentment, Lillian welcomes the second Freitas sister.
Finding their slot increasingly challenged by the new act, Negro minstrels from America, the Freitas Sisters are pressured to undertake something more dangerous in their act. A visiting American, Professor Park Van Tassel, invites them to a hot air balloon and parachute jump show. He gives them jobs as performers. The sisters change employers, as they get traded around like livestock.
Lillian tries a daring feat and is injured, and the ventriloquist Harry Rayward woos her. When she arrives, cured, in Adelaide, financial backers, Edwin Thorne and magicienne Miss Cora, are scrambling for their shares in the proceeds. As Lillian, now named Leila Adair, seeks daredevil fame, the troupe suffers from a series of failed balloon inflations.
Van Tassel’s dialogue sounds a bit awkward, but maybe that’s just a sign of a quirky personality. Some plot developments seem thrown away, although, granted, there’s a limit to how much one can embellish with biography. Lillian suffers from a dark pain from her childhood, her career tears her away from her children, and various frauds and mountebanks double-cross her, yet she doesn’t seem to suffer as much as you know someone would.
An interesting twist towards the end, a secret revealed—and then another—seems unfortunately thrown away, too. The true story finally makes its way through invented personas, lies and tall tales told to whip up a crowd and makes a fascinating concept for a novel.
The writing style is a little bit tongue-in-cheek in tone, without often reaching ‘funny ha-ha’.
The world of professional balloonists/parachutists is beautifully portrayed. The book captures the mood of the age, 1890 Australia/New Zealand, when science and new inventions seemed to make everything suddenly possible, and the public, newly blessed with free time for leisure pursuits, hungered for all things strange, exciting and dangerous.
This is based on the true story of a real woman parachutist, and each chapter is introduced by a real—and wonderfully illuminating—newspaper clipping from the time. The research necessary for this book must have been quite a challenge.
I received an ARC from Reedsy Discovery.

Amy Walsh, A Misplaced Beauty (Kindle 2021)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56493870-a-misplaced-beauty?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=kbqXRHTD68&rank=1

A Victorian romance—a morality tale of married love, spiritual growth and redemption

It’s 1882. Miss Georgina Huxington is the toast of the London season three years running, and she has refused suitor after suitor, even the conceited Lord Bartron. With her younger sisters now coming out, she realises her popularity is an impediment to their potential success. She determines to accept the next proposal she receives.
Malcolm, marquis of Birmingham, has admired her from the corners of the ballroom at Spencer House, and tries his luck, sending her father a letter. To his shock, she accepts. Her mother and sisters warn her that while the marquis has a reputation for kindness, he is, nevertheless, ‘portly’.
She first sets eyes on him as she walks down the aisle, when she discovers that he is PORTLY. He is tetchy and seems to take offence at everything she says. They agree to sleep separately on the first night, and the second, and the third. The awkwardness persists.
Enter Malcolm’s nephew, the handsome Charles, and he is inappropriately flirtatious, matched by Malcolm’s increased surliness. The marriage goes from bad to worse, but Georgina determines to win back her husband’s love. There is tragedy among the tenants, but Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon brings them both into God’s love and love of each other.
The last 15 pages are Georgina’s diary, which I would have preferred sprinkled in as excerpts amidst the rest of the text, or left out, as it doesn’t add much.
This is along the lines of other Victorian romances—mostly concerned with the prospects of eligible upper-class ladies in an age when the bride and groom typically knew nothing about each other apart from their lineages. Having been trained to be superficial and witty at balls, they are unskilled at conducting real, intimate discussions with each other. The conflict theme involves discovering the reasons for the marriage’s success or failure.
With Austen, one has the diversion of exceptionally beautiful language, and the characters are as concerned with lofty matters—pride, prejudice, sense, sensibility—and how these conflict with societal expectations, as they are with gentlemen’s real estate and income. Here, at first, we think this is simply a story about how a husband and wife can misunderstand each other. She is stuck, thinking—’Can I love him even though he’s fat?’ ‘How can I enter the marital bed when I feel so uncomfortable and nervous?’ He is stuck, thinking—’Can a lady so beautiful and refined love a country bumpkin like me?’ ‘How can I sustain my desire when I just saw that glint of disgust in her eye?’
We begin to see that it is a morality tale about the benefits of setting aside pride and vanity for the higher spiritual state of ‘freedom of Grace’ and ‘laying one’s problems before the Throne’ of God. Walsh writes convincingly about the experience of religious conversion, and even as a non-Christian, I empathised with Georgina’s spiritual journey and gained something from it.
This book is the first in a series, as we follow the four Huxington sisters in their quest to find husbands.

Daniel Victor, Sherlock Holmes and the Pandemic of Death (MX Publishing 2021)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/69616206-sherlock-holmes-and-the-pandemic-of-death?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_41

The Covid-19 crisis having made such an enormous impact on our cultural consciousness, it is about time we started seeing titles with this theme. This one, of course, placed in its proper historical context, refers to the previous one, the Spanish Flu of 1918.
The glittering novelist Sinclair Lewis comes to Dr Watson for advice on his upcoming work, a novel about a doctor championing the fight against a deadly disease. The recount of the meeting pokes gentle fun with Watson’s astonishment at the American’s brashness and Sinclair’s amusement at the Englishman’s smugness.
The Spanish Flu being too raw in the writer’s memory, he has decided to write about the plague. It’s a painful subject for Watson, too, plus he’s familiar with Sinclair’s tendence toward satire.
They consult Sherlock Holmes.
As a detective story, it’s not terribly exciting, involving the professional reputations of two bacteriologists and whether or not Pfeiffer’s bacillus was the cause of the Spanish flu, but as a Sherlock Holmes story—using logic, eliminating the impossible—it fits the bill.
Oddly, though Holmes solves the case, he declines to reveal it to the police. Perhaps the beans are spilled in Sinclair’s book, Arrowsmith—I haven’t read it.
The writing style matches quite deliciously Conan Doyle’s Victorian feel. A good deal of the story, as the party discusses the demise of Watson’s late lab partner Martin Aaron-Smith, is told in the past perfect tense, and I always find that uncomfortable, although perhaps it’s in keeping with the Victorian feel.
Though a very easy read, the complex language means it is not one for a younger readership.
It’s a clever concept—focussing on an actual novel and going back in time to create a story about its inspiration. This is Book 7 in the Sherlock Holmes and the American Literati series.
This review first appeared in the Historical Novels Review.

Jennifer Saint, Elektra (Flatiron Books 2022)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58725016-elektra?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=upw59QMtpd&rank=1

This modern retelling of the Homeric myth, follows the lives and fates of three women—Elektra, Clytemnestra, and Cassandra.
Clytemnestra awaits the return home of the husband she hates. They’ve waited ten years. When Aegisthus creeps into their lives, Elektra is suspicious. Orestes grows.
There’s not much variance from Homer and Sophocles in terms of plot besides a more modern feel. For example, Apollo curses Cassandra because she refuses to sleep with him. Saint misses out some top scenes—Clytemnestra with Achilles when she believes he’s to wed her daughter—Iphigenia going meekly to the altar.
Watching the entire scenario from these three viewpoints—from the wrath of Achilles to Odysseus’ final trick to the torching of the topless towers—is something new. What set the Iliad apart from other epic poems of his era was that he told both sides of the story. Saint does the same, as we shift from Mycenae to Troy and back again.
With all the father-murdering and daughter-sacrificing that went on in the House of Atreus, you’d think the women would be pretty hard-nosed, too. They would have taken as read such vicissitudes of war as men squabbling over female war captives like so much booty and the throwing of princes’ babies off high rooves before they can grow up to seek revenge. But the women’s attitudes seem relatable.
It is beautifully written, as we follow the three women’s internal journeys. Cassandra’s description of the inner turmoil that comes along with her gift is very moving; she tends Apollo in the temple but is terrified of his visions. We feel Clytemnestra’s thirst for revenge and Elektra’s longing and the effect on the families as the war drags on and on for too many years.
Saint is also the author of the 2021 Ariadne.
This review first appeared in the Historical Novels Review.

Richard Ayre, Shadow of the Knife (Burning Chair Limited 2021)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59221195-shadow-of-the-knife?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=2Wa2XPxApi&rank=3

Two years since Jack the Ripper stalked the streets. Dr Carter ‘Jigsaw’ Jarman is consulted on a murder, Eliza Cotton, and another, Molly Harnath, both prostitutes killed by a single slice through the throat. Then, the first body goes missing from the morgue, apparently incinerated by order of the police, yet there was no signature on the form.
For detective Jonas Handy, himself the son of a prostitute who died when he was 8, the cases strike close to home.
They check our Molly’s former employ, a matchstick factory owed by Thomas Villiers. The Villiers’ servant Ellie tells Jarman’s driver Curmudgeon that the master has gentlemen friends and women to the house for ‘deviant’ parties when Mrs Villiers is away. And the first victim Eliza had also worked at the match factory, both given jobs as ‘charity’ cases.
Is the Ripper back? Young news reporter Edward Ely believes so. Jarman thinks it’s a copycat killer.
Now, a third victim, literally torn to pieces.
And there it was again, another anti-Semitic slogan. Similar to the Ripper case’s enigmatic ‘The Juwes…’ graffito, a pamphlet was distributed around, stating, ‘The Jewish monster has returned…’ People suspect a police coverup, and the investigators have to flee from an angry vigilante mob, which resulted in three deaths and Callow sustaining an injury to the skull. While the riot was raging, the corpse of the third victim goes missing. And Ely turns up dead, murdered.
Ely has is eye on Villiers. Ely receives a threatening letter, delivered to his home, warning him to ‘stay away from V’, signed ‘Jack the Ripper’. A barmaid informs them that the third victim was Hetty Kennedy, who that night had ‘sweetened herself up’ for an important date. The carter who found the body comes forward, saying he saw someone. Jarman and Curmudgeon travel to Dorking to see Mrs Villiers at her country estate. ‘My husband is not a good man,’ she says. They are informed by Grace at the boarding house that Hetty as well was one of Villiers’ ‘charity’ cases, yet her name has been erased from the office ledger.
The backstory of Jarman’s late wife is a trifle clumsily told, a shame since he is the main protagonist and it’s so pertinent to his character. Jarman realises the paper the ‘Ripper’ letter was on came from the match factory. They arrest the clerk Robert Clinch. Clinch is murdered in his cell, then Grace. Jarman thinks it’s two killers—the three prostitutes by a deranged madman, the others by a methodical professional assassin. Assistant Commissioner Montgomery Pence is implicated. Susannah Villiers reveals that her husband’s ‘parties’ ceased while the Ripper killings were happening. Handy burgles the factory and finds the ledger listing the names of the attendees to Villiers’ parties. Pence reveals to us the identity of the second killer before the investigators have a chance to discover it, which I thought was rather a waste. There are multiple bad guys, here—the original Ripper, the sick slasher of the prostitutes, the methodical assassin, ‘the dark man’ and the ‘Guardian’.
This is very well written, a cut above the usual detective thriller. The author deals well with suspense (a good thing for a detective novel), and one really feels the deprivation and filth of Whitechapel and the horror of the crime scenes.
Every now and again there is an aside in the voice of ‘the dark man’. Unlike many detective novels, where the murderer is just portrayed as a bad ‘un, the psychopathy of this murderer is believable, I thought. Gradually it dawns on us who it is. I rather thought the suspects were guessed too easily by the investigators. A little more than halfway through the book, it looks like the crime is solved. But Pence suspends Handy from duty. Jarman and Handy work out who the original Ripper was.
Richard Ayre is the author of several thrillers.
This review was written for Historical Novels Review.

Dana Stabenow, Disappearance of a Scribe (Head of Zeus 2022)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57070407-disappearance-of-a-scribe?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=UgKFfzmfo7&rank=1

47 BCE. Caesar has returned to Rome, and Cleopatra VII must bring order back to Alexandria.
Tetisheri, her Eye of Isis, records her cases on a scroll in the Great Library. A certain Grafeas had gone missing. Grafeas, a scribe, had been conducting a profitable business recording legal cases. Librarian Sosigenes reports a spate of organised book thefts targeting the most ancient of the documents.
Fishermen discover a body anchored at the bottom of the sea, his feet embedded in cement—‘Rhakotis sandals’. Aristander of the Shurta (Police) says it’s the second such case he’s seen. Tetisheri consults the architect Vitruvius to learn about pozzolan, the pit ash that makes cement seawater-proof. The Roman legate Gaius Aurelius Cotta is also enquiring about pozzolan.
The Eye conducts a merry chase around Alexandria to solve the case. Ever one to put on a good show, Cleopatra stages the big reveal for maximum effect and shows a clemency the historical Cleo was not known for.
I loved the usage of the authentic words for things—a case is called máthema; widths are measured in plethra. People swear ‘by Sobek’s balls’. Weeks are measured in ‘ten-day’s. Metaphors are period-specific—her love Apollodorus’s green eyes are a ‘color straight out of the olivine mines of Punt’; a man has ‘the four-square solidity of the Roman veteran and nothing less than the authority of a tesserarius’.
The writing style is fluent and colourful. It pulls you into a world where 47 BCE is the present day, making you feel as if you are right there. Attention is paid to what people eat and drink and wear. The characters are fascinating; the descriptions gorgeous; the plot swift-paced and the dialogue convincing.
Hooked by chapter one, I couldn’t put it down.
This is Book 2 in the Eye of Isis series.
This review first appeared in the Historical Novels Review.

Olive Collins, The Weaver’s Legacy  (2020)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55956483-the-weaver-s-legacy?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=pVOTjWBbqS&rank=1

Lucy O’Neill has been adopted by her aunt Goldie, who’d left her a ranch in Four Oaks, Wyoming. Trying to convince her to come back and take possession of her property, her cousin Wilbur Breen informs her of the sudden reappearance of her long-lost father Lorcan.
Lorcan has returned after a 30-year absence, and Lucy goes back to Four Oaks to meet him, hoping to learn the real story of the family’s past. She reminisces with Makawee, the Lakota wife of Goldie’s neighbour, while her husband Harry plots to make sure Lorcan is not there to try to claim the property.

Grainne O’Neill (Goldie) is 9 when she sets off West with a wagon train of Irish Catholic immigrants, each family to claim their 160 acres. Her father Barry is keen to leave everything behind, even their Gaelic language, always ‘clawing for more’. Her brother Lorcan can’t seem to do anything right and is ever thirsty to hear stories about killing Indians. The children make friends with Chaytan, the Lakota boy who tames wild mustangs.
Goldie is fighting with her cousin when the grasshoppers (locusts) invade. When the swarm subsides, her baby sister is gone. Each day she steps farther into the forested hills marked as Indian territory and leaves letters for the Indians she believes have taken her sister.
The immigrant families intermarry, carrying their personalities, their prejudices and their vendettas with them, and the various family histories unravel across the generations.
One challenge in writing family sagas is that most families lead pretty ordinary lives. ‘The story of my grandparents’ is really only interesting enough if they’re your own grandparents. There usually has to be some kind of ‘deep, dark family secret’ or mystery to keep the reader wanting to read through till the end while we work through the generations. In this novel, the two mysteries a) where had Lorcan been and why was he back? and b) what happened to Goldie’s baby sister? are just about enough. There’s also c) an undercurrent that Lorcan may not have been ‘the gentleman that she had been led to believe’.
The initial reveal is a bit clumsy, making me wonder if I’d skipped over a few pages somewhere, but it becomes clear in the end. The final revelation is a shocker that comes too late to avoid the tragedies.
It also helps if a story is set during an eventful historical period. The setting is, interestingly enough, defined as the period of time between two great natural disasters—the 1866 Grasshopper Invasion and the 1933 Dust Bowl.
Tx to JM, who gave me this book for my birthday.

Isis Molina, So It Goes  (2022)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60150520-so-it-goes?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=GZy2WpLOK2&rank=5

The good life in suburbia, two men’s love for their children and for each other

Aaron Santos, Karen and 5 year old Danny move into their new dream house in Oklahoma and become acquainted with the neighbours, Lucas, his pregnant artist wife Angelica and their dog Daisy. Aaron and Lucas hit it off right away. Lucas is a writer of ‘comedy horror’ novels, and the two men enjoy a shared love of bad horror films. Aaron shares with Lucas that he’s bisexual and that he is not Danny’s biological dad, a painful subject.
Aaron loves Danny with a passion and wants to be a good dad, unlike his own deadbeat father, and there are other strains within the Santos family dynamic.
It’s very long, 833 pages. And a lot of the story is really ordinary stuff, people unpacking boxes, watching Scooby-doo, fixing lunch, taking the dog for walks, having BBQs and handing each other beers. Lucas helps Aaron pick up a swingset he’s bought off Craigslist. They swim in the pool, have potlucks with Ophelia and her wife Rosa. I don’t really need to know how everybody takes their coffee or when people take bathroom breaks.
Finally, in Part 3 a bombshell is dropped into Aaron’s life, and as he recovers, another bombshell falls on Lucas, but their friendship sees them though. In Part 6 Aaron has to make a heart-wrenching decision.
The Craigslist adventure was not as horrible as we expected (hoped?) it would be. The characters are lively enough to sustain interest, but I did find myself wishing for some vampires or a dead body or something, and I certainly wanted Aaron and Lucas to go ahead and bonk already.
This is a character-driven contemporary novel, maybe a romance, with some sexually explicit scenes. It is beautifully written in a distinct fluent style with a colloquial feel and a strong voice, and it’s perfectly edited.
The strength of this novel is the characters. They are sparkling, well-rounded and interesting from page one, with complex relationships, and I really cared how they all get on. The dialogue is natural and true to each character’s personality.
I was given an ARC by the author.

Sarah Dunant, In the Name of the Family  (Random House 2017)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41021513-in-the-name-of-the-family?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=i0J8FVz2Sv&rank=2

Rodrigo Borgia sits on the papal throne, dreaming of creating a Borgia state in Italy ‘through the brawn of his son and the loins of his daughter’. Cesare is aboard a galley off the coast of Piombino, chafing at the delays to his ambition. Lucrezia, 21 and on her third marriage, is on her way to Ferrara, parading her charms and her dowry at every ducal court along the way.
Lucrezia, eager to spend her dowry and establish her own court, deftly handles her snooty in-laws and a husband who expends most of his energy on fat prostitutes and metallurgy. She is in perilous childbed.
Cesare, supposedly cured of the pox, believes he’s invincible. He blazes a fiery trail of conquests while ‘half of Italy looks over their shoulder to make sure his shadow is not falling across their path’. Pisa and Urbino declare for Borgia; Florence appeals to Louis king of France and would-be Naples only to see Louis and Cesare walking arm in arm.
Pope Alexander weaves his way through interminable ceremonies, ‘playing politics like a winning hand of cards’. He plunders the Church to fund his son’s warfare and hurries to create new cardinals loyal to Borgia.
Lucrezia’s child is stillborn, and after near death, she is nursed back to health by the nuns of Corpus Domini. The poet Pietro Bembo, ‘surely a master of the rules of court dalliance with a great lady’, comes to Ferrara, and a chaste affair begins. ‘An invisible thread of attraction is drawn between them so that if either pulls on it even by a fraction the other is aware.’ Sister-in-law Isabella of Mantua threatens to cause a scandal. Her ‘ladies’ noses are known to reach around corners and through closed doors’. Cesare, having put down a conspiracy of erstwhile allies, Christmases in Cesena, where ‘the ladies seem to relish the progress of their own damnation’. The Pope plunders the estates of his son’s vanquished foes.
This is superb history and haute litérature, featuring really beautiful prose. Will Michelangelo’s colossal new statue David be ‘powerful enough to shield the city from the Borgia Goliath’? Dinner at the household of Florentine diplomat Machiavelli, though whose eyes much of this story is told, ‘feels crowded though there are only two at the table’.
The Borgias’ lust for power and fierce love for each other makes a wonderful story, and Dunant does it more than justice.