Tag: historical fiction

Blog Tour/Review: Lady Helena Investigates by Jane Steen

whatcathyreadnext2 Comments

Lady Helena Investigates_Blog Tour Banner_FINAL

I’m delighted to be co-hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for Lady Helena Investigates by Jane Steen and to share my review of this engaging historical mystery.  Lady Helena Investigates is the first in a new series, the suitably aristocratic sounding Scott-De Quincey Mysteries.  The author describes the series as blending family saga and mystery-driven action with a slow-burn romance.  Ticks a lot of boxes for me there!

WinVisit the tour page to view the other great bloggers taking part in the tour and, for US residents only, to enter the giveaway for a chance to win one of two ecopies of Lady Helena Investigates.  Don’t hang about though as the giveaway ends at 11:59pm EST on 13th April 2018.

Lady Helena InvestigatesAbout the Book

1881, Sussex. Lady Helena Scott-De Quincy’s marriage to Sir Justin Whitcombe, three years before, gave new purpose to a life almost destroyed by the death of Lady Helena’s first love. After all, shouldn’t the preoccupations of a wife and hostess be sufficient to fulfil any aristocratic female’s dreams? Such a shame their union wasn’t blessed by children…but Lady Helena is content with her quiet country life until Sir Justin is found dead in the river overlooked by their grand baroque mansion.

The intrusion of attractive, mysterious French physician Armand Fortier, with his meddling theory of murder, into Lady Helena’s first weeks of mourning is bad enough. But with her initial ineffective efforts at investigation and her attempts to revive her long-abandoned interest in herbalism comes the realization that she may have been mistaken about her own family’s past. Every family has its secrets – but the Scott-De Quincy family has more than most.

Can Lady Helena survive bereavement the second time around? Can she stand up to her six siblings’ assumption of the right to control her new life as a widow? And what role will Fortier – who, as a physician, is a most unsuitable companion for an earl’s daughter – play in her investigations?

Format: ebook (359 pp.)                Publisher: Aspidistra Press
Published: 14th March 2018          Genre: Historical Fiction, Mystery

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Lady Helena Investigates on Goodreads

My Review

“I wonder – do we ever really know other people?  Even those you see daily can have hidden lives.”

The book’s opening chapters provide helpful scene setting as recent tragic events in Lady Helena’s life are revealed and the reader is introduced to her extensive family.   The death of her husband has turned Lady Helena’s life upside down.  As well as the loss of a dearly-loved companion, as a widow her horizons are now severely constrained by the expectations of society.  Not just expected to wear sombre mourning clothes for a year and a day but to remain in seclusion from society.  To make matters worse, her brother is trying to persuade her to let him take control of the management of her estate and pressing her to consider marrying again as soon as the period of mourning is done. Still struggling to deal with her grief, Lady Helena also knows that to marry again, given the current law of the land, will have momentous consequences for her. ‘For the day I put my hand into a man’s – out of love, out of loneliness, or simply to please my family – the property that had once been Justin’s and was now mine, and the lives of those who had worked for us, would pass into the keeping of my new husband.’  

Lady Helena’s interest in herbalism, inherited from her mother the Dowager Countess, now sadly losing her wits, is looked on with disdain by her brother and some of her sisters.  For a woman in Lady Helena’s position, a husband, house and children is expected to be enough.   However, Lady Helena’s studies play a part in revealing the true circumstances of her husband’s death.  As events unfold, it transpires that the mystery of Sir Justin’s death is as nothing compared with the secrets within Lady Helena’s own family history.

French physician, Armand Fortier makes an engaging and amiable partner for Lady Helena in her investigations – very amiable, in fact. Not that he doesn’t have his own secrets it appears.  However, it has to be said that external events and chance play a significant role in the resolution of the mystery, as Lady Helena is honest enough to admit.  “Do you realize,” I said after a long stretch of silence, “that the truth has come to light with very little investigative effort on my part? This isn’t how it happens in novels.” [Love that the author allows herself that little joke.]

The enactment of an inconsequential sounding but actually quite significant piece of legislation offers Lady Helena the prospect of more control over her own future, allowing the author to adeptly set up events for the next book in the series.

I really enjoyed Lady Helena Investigates – a lovely example of a light, entertaining historical mystery.  I received a review copy courtesy of the author and Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours in return for an honest and unbiased review.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

In three words: Lively, engaging, mystery

Try something similar…Duels and Deception by Cindy Anstey (click here to read my review)

Jane SteenAbout the Author

Jane Steen was born in England and, despite having spent more years out of the British Isles than in, still has a British accent according to just about every American she meets.  Her long and undistinguished career has included a three-year stint as the English version of a Belgian aerospace magazine, an interesting interlude as an editor in a very large law firm, and several hectic years in real estate marketing at the height of the property boom. This tendency to switch directions every few years did nothing for her resume but gave her ample opportunity to sharpen her writing skills and develop an entrepreneurial spirit.

Around the edges of her professional occupations and raising children, she stuck her nose in a book at every available opportunity and at one time seemed on course to become the proverbial eternal student. Common sense prevailed, though, and eventually she had the bright idea of putting her passion for books together with her love of business and writing to become a self-published author.

Jane has lived in three countries and is currently to be found in the Chicago suburbs with her long-suffering husband and two adult daughters.

Connect with Jane

Website ǀ  Facebook ǀ  Twitter  ǀ  Pinterest ǀ GoodreadsLady Helena Investigates_Blog Tour Banner_FINAL

 

Book Review: Things Bright and Beautiful by Anbara Salam

whatcathyreadnext

Things Bright and BeautifulAbout the Book

Mission House was not built for three people. Especially when one of them won’t stop humming.

1954, the South Pacific islands. When Beatriz Hanlon agreed to accompany her missionary husband Max to a remote island, she knew there would be challenges. But it isn’t just the heat and the damp and the dirt. There are more insects than she could ever have imagined, and the islanders are strangely hostile. And then there are the awful noises coming from the church at night.

Yet as the months go by, Bea slowly grows accustomed to life on the island. That is until an unexpected and interminably humming guest arrives, and the couple’s claustrophobic existence is stretched to breaking point.  Events draw to a terrible climax, and Bea watches helplessly as her husband’s guilt drives him into madness. It’s not long before Bea finds herself fighting for her freedom and her life.

Format: ebook, hardcover (288 pp.)        Publisher: Fig Tree
Published: 5th April 2018                           Genre: Historical Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ  Book Depository ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops) *links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Things Bright and Beautiful on Goodreads

My Review

Things Bright and Beautiful is set on an island in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), which I can safely say is a first for me as the location for a book.  “The isle is full of noises” (The Tempest, Act 3 Scene 2).

Arriving on Advent Island with her missionary husband, Max, Bea finds her new home is no Bali Ha’i.  Whatever she was expecting it wasn’t the incessant insects, dirt, heat, rain and the almost suffocating nature of the jungle.  ‘Its constant whirring noises, its fetid organic complexity.  Its restlessness. So many thousands of trees and and bushes and leaves, each populated by slithering, crawling insects, all with tiny hearts pumping and pumping.’ The jungle threatens to invade even their home in the Mission House.  ‘On Advent Island, the jungle refused to stay outdoors, it lurked at the corners of the village and wormed its way into civilization.  Pale weevils cavorted in the powdered milk, black orchids blossomed in the shower… It perpetuated itself with explosive fertility.’

Max is buoyed up by the strength of his faith and his fervent belief in the importance of his mission. ‘To think there were still villages, here on the island, which had never heard the Word.  It was the last frontier.  His chance to carve out another kingdom for the Lord.’  However, Bea initially struggles to adjust to the many ‘tabus’ governing a woman’s place in the social order of the island.   ‘She wasn’t supposed to go walking around by herself.  She wasn’t to show any skin above her elbows or knees…She wasn’t allowed to go out in a dugout canoe.  It was tabu for women to fish…She wasn’t to wear her hair loose.  She mustn’t dry her cloths outside, especially any underclothes. She wasn’t to point directly at anything, because it was unlucky.’    I loved the way the author gives us small signs of Bea’s spirited and slightly rebellious nature, a spirit that will sustain her through the trials to come.  ‘It made Bea feel a little wild.  All she wished to do was to leap from her house on a Sunday morning, wearing only her underclothes with her hair shockingly loose, and run straight down the cost in a dugout and start fishing.’

The island is so remote – no running water, sanitation, electricity – that I constantly had to remind myself the book is set in the 1950s, not in the Victorian age.  Bea and Max’s isolation from the life they’ve known before is almost total.  ‘They had brought a transistor radio with them, but the island was too far out to catch any frequencies.’  Because there are no clocks on the island, the pace of life follows ‘island time’.  However, the islanders are industrious and resourceful, making use of whatever animal life, fruit, herbs and roots the island can provide.  They are used to making long treks between villages that take hours, even days, over often perilous paths where one slip can spell disaster – and, in fact, does with momentous consequences.

Although many of the islanders have ostensibly embraced Christianity, they cling to their traditional ways or ‘kastoms’, with anything else being ‘tabu’.  They have a particularly strong sense of the power of the Devil, who exists for them as an almost physical presence within parts of the jungle or within people.  Under the influence of the charismatic Aru, the villagers indulge in ‘dark praying’ in an effort to exorcise the evil presence they feel all about them.

Bea’s mood lifts as the rainy season ends and the vibrant, kaleidoscopic profusion of the island becomes evident, conveyed in wonderfully lush prose by the author.  ‘Candy-pink hibiscus flowers appeared in the hedges, crinkled at the edges like crȇpe paper.  Crimson-headed honeyeaters buzzed at the tips of banana suckers.  Gigantic butterflies swarmed in and out of the palms, streaked with electric-blue zigzags.  Occasionally, in the fringes of the coconut palms south of the village, there was the bright flash of parrots, a conflagration of colours so impossibly lurid they looked like novelty recreations of themselves, made from marzipan.’  Max is not doing so well.  The rain, the insects, the humidity, the heat, the macabre night-time chanting of the islanders and the after-effects of malarial fever all play on his mind.  ‘The island was doing things to him.  He was supposed to be here to set an example.’  He is also consumed by guilt for his role in a tragic event that he has kept secret.

Having formed a valuable friendship, Bea gradually develops a courage and resilience that surprises Max.  She’s no longer the damaged young woman he first met in Venezuela.  However, affected by the febrile atmosphere of the island, Max begins to fear that Bea’s very soul is in spiritual danger.  ‘And despite his best efforts, the darkness inside her persisted’.  Events take a darker turn before reaching a shocking conclusion.

The book introduces other characters and another storyline that touches on the impact of colonialism and the plight of Vietnamese workers brought to the island on five year contracts to toil in the plantations. However, this always feels secondary to the compelling story of Max and Bea.

This is a book that transports the reader to another time and place. At times, Things Bright and Beautiful has a dreamlike quality; at other times, it’s more the stuff of nightmares.  With its intoxicating atmosphere, Things Bright and Beautiful is like the love child of Black Narcissus, Heart of Darkness and Wide Sargasso Sea.  An impressive and imaginative debut; I look forward to reading more from this author.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of NetGalley and publishers, Fig Tree, in return for an honest and unbiased review.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

In three words: Strange, atmospheric, immersive

Try something similar…The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert (click here to read my review)

Anbara SalamAbout the Author

Anbara Salam is half-Palestinian and half-Scottish, and grew up in London. She has a PhD in Theology and now lives in Oxford. She spent six months working on a small South Pacific island, and her experiences there served as the inspiration for her first novel, Things Bright and Beautiful.

Connect with Anbara

Website ǀ  Twitter ǀ  Goodreads