Now that you’re finally back to scandalize the good gentry, life should be much more interesting. Fire, mermaids, herring pies, gossip, and half the town jammed with fools debating the folly of the rest, and all of them talking about you. I’m delighted you’re back.
Cosy crime novel, the first in the Greenwing and Dart series, set in Victoria Goddard's 'Nine Worlds' universe. From other novels (specifically The Return of Fitzroy Angursell and At the Feet of the Sun) I know more about some of the characters than Goddard tells us in this first installment: I wonder if she had their later stories in mind when writing this?
It's a frothy, cheerful novel, despite some fairly dark undertones. Jemis Greenwing, our first-person narrator, has returned in disgrace to the sleepy, notoriously dull town of Ragnor Bella where he grew up. Due to illness, he missed the death and funeral of his stepfather; his stepfather's second wife is happy to give him a home, but she can't help with the rumours about his dead father, or the lingering illness that still afflicts him, or the disaster of his time at university, or the heartbreak at his lover's betrayal. Jemis should have inherited the Greenwing estate: instead, he's working at Elderflower Books, for the charming and genteel Mrs Etaris. Luckily his old friend Mr Perry Dart is in town, and invites Jemis to go mushroom-hunting. Jemis thinks this is a veiled excuse for gambling or poaching (both popular local pastimes) but it turns out to be an expedition to spy on a secret cult in the forest...
There is a mermaid; an actual stargazy pie; a decadent dinner party, with matching footmen; a young lady dressed as, but not pretending to be, a young gentleman; allusions to the work of banned anarchist poet Fitzroy Angursell; a drug-smuggling operation; a villain quelled by sneezes; and a number of surprising, and positive, revelations for Jemis.
I enjoyed this a great deal, though I was almost as frustrated by Jemis' constant sneezes as his companions were. It's very nice to read a fantasy crime novel in which (almost) nobody behaves in a way that'd be out of place in the works of Austen or Heyer! (Well, apart from the ritual sacrifice. And the orgy. And ... But those are mostly off-screen!) The novel is available for free as part of Sword and Magic: Eight Fantasy Novels: I'm quite likely to dip into the series further, not least for glimpses of those characters mentioned in other strands of Goddard's work.
No comments:
Post a Comment