Tag: historical mystery

Book Review: The Wages of Sin by Kaite Welsh

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For Sarah Gilchrist, even medicine can be deadly

TheWagesofSinAbout the Book

Publisher’s description: Sarah Gilchrist has fled from London to Edinburgh in disgrace and is determined to become a doctor, despite the misgivings of her family and society. As part of the University of Edinburgh’s first intake of female medical students, Sarah comes up against resistance from lecturers, her male contemporaries, and – perhaps worst of all – her fellow women, who will do anything to avoid being associated with a fallen woman…

When one of Sarah’s patients turns up in the university dissecting room as a battered corpse, Sarah finds herself drawn into Edinburgh’s dangerous underworld of bribery, brothels and body snatchers – and a confrontation with her own past.

Book Facts

  • Format: Hardcover
  • Publisher: Tinder Press
  • No. of pages: 320
  • Publication date: 1st June 2017
  • Genre: Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery

To pre-order/purchase The Wages of Sin from Amazon.co.uk, click here (link provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme)

My Review

The author has created an interesting, at times, feisty character in Sarah Gilchrist who, in the face of opposition from society and family, is training to be a doctor at a time when this was considered an unsuitable occupation for a woman. When a prostitute she encountered while volunteering at a community infirmary turns up dead on the dissecting table, Sarah’s instincts are to suspect foul play. For personal reasons linked to her own past, she feels an affinity with the dead girl and a determination that her death should not just be another unsolved murder of a ‘fallen woman’.

‘Someone had done this to her, and enough people had failed to care that murder had gone unnoticed.’

A theme running through the book is the unequal treatment of women by society: economically, politically, intellectually, sexually.

‘Society lady or scullery maid – no matter what our future held, we were expected to go about it looking as though we had never even conceived of having an opinion about anything.’

Sarah’s own back story reinforces this message as the reader learns of past experiences which have scarred her both mentally and physically.   To learn of the attitudes and actions of that time is quite shocking.  Occasionally, a little bit of me felt the message about the unfair treatment of women at the hands of men – although completely justified by the historical evidence – got a little repetitive. I found myself thinking: OK, I get the point!  However, perhaps this a message that can never be repeated too often.

Some elements of the mystery at the heart of the novel went in directions I expected but others certainly did not. Along the way Sarah ventures up some of the same dead-ends and falls for the same red herrings as the reader. There were some good twists as the solution to the mystery was unravelled. The book also nicely sets up the story for future books in the series.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of NetGalley and publishers, Headline/Tinder Press, in return for an honest review.

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In three words: Atmospheric, feisty, mystery

Try something similar…Affinity by Sarah Waters

Kaite WestAbout the Author

Kaite Welsh is an author, critic and journalist living in Scotland. Her novel The Wages of Sin, a feminist historical crime novel set in Victorian Edinburgh, is out in 2017 from Pegasus Books in the US in May and Headline/Tinder Press in June. It is the first novel featuring medical student, fallen woman and amateur sleuth Sarah Gilchrist, with two further books due in 2018 and 2019. Kaite’s fiction has featured in several anthologies and she writes a regular column on LGBT issues for the Daily Telegraph as well as making frequent appearances on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. In 2014 she was shortlisted for both the Scottish New Writers Award and the Moniack Mhor Bridge Award. She has also been shortlisted for the 2010 Cheshire Prize for Fiction and the 2010 Spectrum Award for short fiction.

Connect with Kaite

Website https://kaitewelsh.wordpress.com/
Twitter https://twitter.com/kaitewelsh
Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4678519.Kaite_Welsh

Blog Tour & Guest Post: The Body in the Ice by A.J. MacKenzie

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I’m delighted to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for The Body in Ice by A. J. MacKenzie, a historical mystery set on Romney Marsh, Kent.   You’re in for a real treat because I have a guest post by the authors entitled ‘Secrets of Romney Marsh’.   If any of you have visited Romney Marsh, you’ll know what a spooky place it can be!

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TheBodyInTheIce2About the Book

Christmas Day, Kent, 1796. On the frozen fields of Romney Marsh stands New Hall; silent, lifeless, deserted. In its grounds lies an unexpected Christmas offering: a corpse, frozen into the ice of a horse pond. It falls to the Reverend Hardcastle, justice of the peace at St Mary in the Marsh, to investigate. But with the victim’s identity unknown, no murder weapon and no known motive, it seems like an impossible task. Working along with his trusted friend, Amelia Chaytor, and new arrival Captain Edward Austen, Hardcastle soon discovers there is more to the mystery than there first appeared.  With the arrival of an American family torn apart by war and desperate to reclaim their ancestral home, a French spy returning to the scene of his crimes, ancient loyalties and new vengeance combine to make Hardcastle and Mrs Chaytor’s attempts to discover the secret of New Hall all the more dangerous. The Body in the Ice, with its unique cast of characters, captivating amateur sleuths and a bitter family feud at its heart, is a twisting tale that vividly brings to life eighteenth-century Kent and draws readers into its pages.

Book Facts

  • Format: Hardcover
  • Publisher: Bonnier Zaffre
  • No. of pages: 368
  • Publication date: 20th April 2017
  • Genre: Historical Fiction, Mystery

To purchase The Body in the Ice from Amazon.co.uk, click here (link provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme)

Guest Post: ‘Secrets of Romney Marsh’

The landscape of Romney Marsh hasn’t changed that much over the years. There are more trees now, and fewer people. The ground is dryer, thanks to better drainage after the Royal Military Canal was built two centuries ago, and many fields are now ploughed. Of course you have to shut your eyes to the power station at Dungeness and the wind farm on the Guldford Levels. But apart from that, you can still stand and let the wind rush around you and listen to the murmur of the sea, just as Reverend Hardcastle and Mrs Chaytor did long ago. Many of the roads are now paved, but are still very narrow and bounded by drainage ditches and need to be negotiated with care. Bicycles are now more of a hazard than the wagons that slowed Mrs Chaytor down in The Body on the Doorstep.

One of the finest features of Romney Marsh are its churches. Built in the Middle Ages, when the Marsh grew rich and populous on the back of the wool trade, they range from intimate little buildings, barely larger than chapels, like St Clement’s at Old Romney or lonely St Thomas a Becket at Fairfield, to magnificent buildings rising like lighthouses above the flat lands. All Saints at Lydd at St Nicholas at New Romney are true landmarks, their tall towers visible for miles across the Marsh. So too is the smaller church at St Mary in the Marsh. One can imagine mariners at sea taking bearings on it and using it as a landmark.

More secretive and hard to find are the ruins of other churches, crumbling back into the ground. These churches were abandoned after the communities around them were laid waste by the Black Death and malaria, or ‘marsh fever’. Hope was one such village; the church of All Saints there is now no more than a few fragments of stone. (In The Body in the Ice, set two hundred years ago, we have given the ruined church rather more substantial walls.) Blackmanstone is a single fragment of wall, overgrown among the trees. If you stop on the roadside and look hard enough, you will eventually spot the few remaining stones of the church at Midley, next to a working farm.

Remants of Roman occupation of the area can also be glimpsed. All Saints Lydd has one wall surviving from an earlier Roman building. The settlement at Portus Lemanis looks over the marsh low on the hill at Lympne. Glimpses of re-used Roman carving and sculpture can be found in the corners of the Marsh’s churches.

Some secrets of the Marsh are now a matter for public pride. Go into a pub anywhere on the Marsh and the chances are it will boast a smuggling connection. In many cases – the Woolpack near Fairfield, the Ship in New Romney, the Star in St Mary in the Marsh – this is verifiably true. But two hundred years ago no one would have talked openly about smuggling in public; not with Customs snitches lurking and listening. Smuggling was an offence punishable by death. The smugglers and their families kept their mouths closed, and watched every stranger with suspicion.

One of the best kept secrets of the Marsh is also the most ghoulish. Hidden away below the chancel of St Leonard’s church in Hythe is an ossuary. One of only two in the country, the ossuary is a bone store, believed to have been created in the Middle Ages when bodies had to be removed from graves to make way for new burials. There are about 2,000 skulls in the ossuary, neatly arranged on wooden shelves, and around 8,000 other assorted bones.

Today the Marsh is green and peaceful, quiet and off the beaten track. Its landscape has been forged by men (and sheep) over many centuries. Its churches and its ruins hold many secrets; and some have yet to be discovered.

TheBodyintheIceMap

AJMackenzieAbout the Authors

A.J. MacKenzie is the pseudonym of Marilyn Livingstone and Morgen Witzel, a collaborative Anglo-Canadian husband-and-wife duo. Between them they have written more than twenty non-fiction and academic titles, with specialisms including management, medieval economic history and medieval warfare.  The original idea for The Body…series came when the authors were living in Kent, when they often went down to Romney Marsh to enjoy the unique landscape and the beautiful old churches. The authors now live in Devon.

Connect with the authors

Twitter  https://twitter.com/AJMacKnovels
Website http://www.ajmackenzienovels.com/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/AJMacKenzienovels/
Pinterest https://uk.pinterest.com/bonnierzaffre/the-body-on-the-doorstep/?etslf=7279&eq=body%20on%20the%20

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