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lisalotte's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
mysterious
medium-paced
3.0
soniapage's review against another edition
2.0
There is a lot of history of the Roman church in here and LOTS of names of historical figures. This is fine except there was too much of this for me and it got in the way of the story. I have never read anything about this time period so I definitely learned a lot. I found Sister Fidelma to be too prickly for me to say she was a good strong character. I may try the next in the series sometime.
jennthelibrarian's review against another edition
3.0
A very good start to the Sister Fidelma mystery series. It's one I would contemplate reading more in the future. Tremayne throws a lot of ancient Irish history at you, almost all at once, and while I appreciate and understand why he does so, it can be very overwhelming and difficult to remember. There were several aspects of the mystery that to me were quite obvious (and I don't read mysteries to figure out who did it- I like to find out with the characters who dunnit), but overall I liked Fidelma and admired the society she lived in. What a shame the Roman way won out- equality would have been a way of our lives from the very beginning.
cardica's review against another edition
4.0
For our 2022 Recommendations on Death of the Reader, we’ve finally reached the top five. In fifth place I would like to take us back to a simpler time, one where Saxons roamed the countryside and the black plague was the hottest new piece of goss on the market. I am of course handing this position to Absolution by Murder, authored by Peter Tremayne as the first entry in the Sister Fidelma series.
Absolution was one of the novels that I was most nervous about bringing to the table this year, being not just a piece of historical fiction but being written by acclaimed celtic scholar Peter Berresford Ellis. The story takes place at a real event that happened to real people, and mixes in fictional with non-fictional characters in order to create not only an entertaining tour of the Abbey of Whitby in 664AD but also to entice fellow historians with a piece of speculative fiction around the infamous Synod of Whitby wherein the Christian churches of Celtic and Roman peoples were forced to reconcile. The true trick of this book is that even thought its set several thousand years in the past, the politics of religious freedoms and interpretations of the truth align themselves well with the modern understanding of murder mystery.
At this nexus event of history, an Abbess Etain is found murdered, sparks fly as the Celts investigate the Romans and the Romans threaten to crush the Celts under their heel, in a good Christian sort of way. Enter our protagonist Sister Fidelma. She is a member of the Celtic branch of the church, has a fierce head of red hair so we know she means business and will likely end her tale burning something down, and she is tasked by the neutral good king Oswy to make sense of the Abbess’ death and see who might want to bring her harm. Because Oswy is a good an wise king who looks for treachery around every corner, he assigns Fidelma a Saxon who is aligned with the Roman Church so that whatever conclusion the two of them may reach, it can be judged as impartial.
This is the key to understanding and enjoying the novel. Taken at face value it’s a fairly straightforward plot with an excellent sense of place (the killing of a man by drowning him in a wine barrel is a particularly fun metaphor of a murder) and the romance that threatens to blossom between our two detective leads is fun if a little predictable. But I found myself getting the most out of this book where research meets speculation. In the real historical event of the Synod of Whitby, the King Oswy is a respectable footnote, mediating between the Celtic and Roman churches to come to what everyone can agree is the impartial answer. Because he is more familiar with the Celtic traditions and his wife was brought up Roman, he is understood to represent that neutral ground. Fidelma and her Saxon sidekick Eadulf then, are a fictional tool used to explore the conflict that must have been going on in the heart of the king on that day that set Christianity on the course to follow the Romans.
All throughout the book Tremayne is peppering his own observations of Christian European culture, and applying a healthy layer of skepticism to the generally accepted truths of Whitby as we know it. We interrogate a supposed madman about astrology, we meet the hard-hearted son of the king Ahlfrith, who very clearly doesn’t respect his father in the slightest. All of these fleshy character scenes are interspersed with checkins on the debates happening within the heart of the Abbey, where we can see Tremayne has done his homework including speeches taken verbatim from historical texts, adding to the weight of the novel as a whole and raising the stakes. Obviously as we live in the 21st century we know what the ultimate outcome of the Synod was, the country didn’t devolve into chaos, King Oswy was not thrown out by his countrymen, but when Tremayne pulls back the murder mystery curtain to the beating heart of the novel, we get to partake in his own imagination of what truly happened in this days, taking dates and places from textbooks and breathing life into them and filling them with real people whose daily lifes hung in the balance of debates that took weeks to resolve, but which ultimately were about which way a monk should cut their hair, and how we should calculate the days of Easter, exactly.
I want to jump back to Sister Fidelma herself, she is not just any sort of detective, but a daleigh. In her Irish culture this gives her the authority to stand up to Kings. This of course is implemented to support her fiery nature, and leads to some really fun scenes where she calls out those in authority around her, and there is a lot of “how dare she” and “you can’t do that” especially from Brother Eadulf, who is a slightly humbler man of science and medicine. The two of them do well together where she is undoubtedly the cleverer of the two he has broader technical knowledge, allowing them to bounce off of each other despite their insistence that they really don’t like each other that much. Fidelma first and foremost prioritises the search for the truth, and there is an underlying sense that if she were to find out the wrong truth, things might not end terribly well for her.
Absolution by Murder is a masterclass in historical fiction, and actively drove me to do my own independent research to fully understand the context of the text. Tremayne has done a phenomenal job of playing with classic murder mystery tropes in an unconventional period while also creating a historical argument around the personal motivations of the political figures involved in the religious arguments at the Synod of Whitby. What a mouthful. I heartily recommend giving this one a shot if you’d like to see murder in a medieval style.
Absolution was one of the novels that I was most nervous about bringing to the table this year, being not just a piece of historical fiction but being written by acclaimed celtic scholar Peter Berresford Ellis. The story takes place at a real event that happened to real people, and mixes in fictional with non-fictional characters in order to create not only an entertaining tour of the Abbey of Whitby in 664AD but also to entice fellow historians with a piece of speculative fiction around the infamous Synod of Whitby wherein the Christian churches of Celtic and Roman peoples were forced to reconcile. The true trick of this book is that even thought its set several thousand years in the past, the politics of religious freedoms and interpretations of the truth align themselves well with the modern understanding of murder mystery.
At this nexus event of history, an Abbess Etain is found murdered, sparks fly as the Celts investigate the Romans and the Romans threaten to crush the Celts under their heel, in a good Christian sort of way. Enter our protagonist Sister Fidelma. She is a member of the Celtic branch of the church, has a fierce head of red hair so we know she means business and will likely end her tale burning something down, and she is tasked by the neutral good king Oswy to make sense of the Abbess’ death and see who might want to bring her harm. Because Oswy is a good an wise king who looks for treachery around every corner, he assigns Fidelma a Saxon who is aligned with the Roman Church so that whatever conclusion the two of them may reach, it can be judged as impartial.
This is the key to understanding and enjoying the novel. Taken at face value it’s a fairly straightforward plot with an excellent sense of place (the killing of a man by drowning him in a wine barrel is a particularly fun metaphor of a murder) and the romance that threatens to blossom between our two detective leads is fun if a little predictable. But I found myself getting the most out of this book where research meets speculation. In the real historical event of the Synod of Whitby, the King Oswy is a respectable footnote, mediating between the Celtic and Roman churches to come to what everyone can agree is the impartial answer. Because he is more familiar with the Celtic traditions and his wife was brought up Roman, he is understood to represent that neutral ground. Fidelma and her Saxon sidekick Eadulf then, are a fictional tool used to explore the conflict that must have been going on in the heart of the king on that day that set Christianity on the course to follow the Romans.
All throughout the book Tremayne is peppering his own observations of Christian European culture, and applying a healthy layer of skepticism to the generally accepted truths of Whitby as we know it. We interrogate a supposed madman about astrology, we meet the hard-hearted son of the king Ahlfrith, who very clearly doesn’t respect his father in the slightest. All of these fleshy character scenes are interspersed with checkins on the debates happening within the heart of the Abbey, where we can see Tremayne has done his homework including speeches taken verbatim from historical texts, adding to the weight of the novel as a whole and raising the stakes. Obviously as we live in the 21st century we know what the ultimate outcome of the Synod was, the country didn’t devolve into chaos, King Oswy was not thrown out by his countrymen, but when Tremayne pulls back the murder mystery curtain to the beating heart of the novel, we get to partake in his own imagination of what truly happened in this days, taking dates and places from textbooks and breathing life into them and filling them with real people whose daily lifes hung in the balance of debates that took weeks to resolve, but which ultimately were about which way a monk should cut their hair, and how we should calculate the days of Easter, exactly.
I want to jump back to Sister Fidelma herself, she is not just any sort of detective, but a daleigh. In her Irish culture this gives her the authority to stand up to Kings. This of course is implemented to support her fiery nature, and leads to some really fun scenes where she calls out those in authority around her, and there is a lot of “how dare she” and “you can’t do that” especially from Brother Eadulf, who is a slightly humbler man of science and medicine. The two of them do well together where she is undoubtedly the cleverer of the two he has broader technical knowledge, allowing them to bounce off of each other despite their insistence that they really don’t like each other that much. Fidelma first and foremost prioritises the search for the truth, and there is an underlying sense that if she were to find out the wrong truth, things might not end terribly well for her.
Absolution by Murder is a masterclass in historical fiction, and actively drove me to do my own independent research to fully understand the context of the text. Tremayne has done a phenomenal job of playing with classic murder mystery tropes in an unconventional period while also creating a historical argument around the personal motivations of the political figures involved in the religious arguments at the Synod of Whitby. What a mouthful. I heartily recommend giving this one a shot if you’d like to see murder in a medieval style.
spookysoto's review against another edition
3.0
2.5/5
Este libro es interesante, pero como esta ambientado en una época medieval, se hace difícil seguir a los personajes porque tienen nombres muy raros. Al principio es lento, pero luego el ritmo mejora.
Me gustó el personaje de Sor Fidelma y probablemente lea otro en el futuro.
Este libro es interesante, pero como esta ambientado en una época medieval, se hace difícil seguir a los personajes porque tienen nombres muy raros. Al principio es lento, pero luego el ritmo mejora.
Me gustó el personaje de Sor Fidelma y probablemente lea otro en el futuro.
berlinbibliophile's review against another edition
2.0
I'm conflicted on this book. On the one hand, I liked the mystery, the setting, and the main characters, on the other hand, I could not stand the author's constant preaching. We get it, the Irish were enlightened marvels and the British were backwards savages. The setting is meant to be a debate between the merits of the Roman and the Columban styles of Christianity, but it could not be made clearer that one is right and the other wrong if the author bashed the reader over the head with a sign saysing "Rome sucks". This honestly distracted me from the simple mystery and the fun and engaging detectives. I really liked Fidelma and Eadulf, but I don't think I can take another book of the author constantly pulling the reader out of the story to explain the moral to them. Especially when the mystery's solution is "those evil predatory lesbians".
eososray's review against another edition
4.0
I thought it was about time I tried this series as it's been on my to be read for over a year.
I am a big fan of medieval mysteries and this is well on it's way to being a favorite just from the first book.
When the Celtic and Roman Church followers gather in Whitby to try and iron out their differences, the tension is palatable. When Abbess Etain is found murdered before she can speak for the Celtic church the tensions rise to an almost unbearable level and King Oswy turns to Irish lawyer Sister Fidelma and Saxon Brother Eadulf to find the murderer before the gathering dissolves into a war.
The feisty Sister Fidelma is no doubt the best part of this story for me. The church politics, ocean side castle setting and Brother Eadulf were just icing on the cake for this ancient Irish murder mystery.
I am a big fan of medieval mysteries and this is well on it's way to being a favorite just from the first book.
When the Celtic and Roman Church followers gather in Whitby to try and iron out their differences, the tension is palatable. When Abbess Etain is found murdered before she can speak for the Celtic church the tensions rise to an almost unbearable level and King Oswy turns to Irish lawyer Sister Fidelma and Saxon Brother Eadulf to find the murderer before the gathering dissolves into a war.
The feisty Sister Fidelma is no doubt the best part of this story for me. The church politics, ocean side castle setting and Brother Eadulf were just icing on the cake for this ancient Irish murder mystery.
leavingsealevel's review against another edition
2.0
Meh...Sister Fidelma is nowhere near as cool a mystery-solver as Brehon Mara of the Burren. However, I am done with all of those books, and there are about 20 more of these, so I might pick up a few more at some point.
molly_roanoke's review against another edition
3.0
Reading Absolution by Murder by Peter Tremayne is like:
Reading an episode of Murder, She Wrote set in Ancient Ireland or thereabouts.
Would you marry Absolution by Murder, by Peter Tremayne (NOT HIS REAL NAME):
I would not marry this book because this book was a little homophobic and I don't marry a book just b/c it's exactly what I want (except for being a little homophobic), even if I fully intend to read the next 23 books in the series.
Would you like to add any spoilers?:
It's not possible to spoil this book b/c right away Peter Tremayne tells you know that this one nun is "gawky" and "reads too much Sappho" and then pretty much keeps incriminating her from that point on.
Reading an episode of Murder, She Wrote set in Ancient Ireland or thereabouts.
Would you marry Absolution by Murder, by Peter Tremayne (NOT HIS REAL NAME):
I would not marry this book because this book was a little homophobic and I don't marry a book just b/c it's exactly what I want (except for being a little homophobic), even if I fully intend to read the next 23 books in the series.
Would you like to add any spoilers?:
It's not possible to spoil this book b/c right away Peter Tremayne tells you know that this one nun is "gawky" and "reads too much Sappho" and then pretty much keeps incriminating her from that point on.
capra's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0