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sandylc's review
adventurous
5.0
Wonderful blend of history and fiction; exciting and tense with many interwoven threads. I will be reading the next (last?) two very soon.
archytas's review
4.0
A return to form for a series I had worried was losing it's way. Back in the Scottish marshes, and Scotland itself, the characters are allowed to revert from the stereotypes they seemed to become in London, and the book takes a slightly more serious turn for the better.
Chisholm's Carey is a magnificent creation, his foppishness and idiocy in love balanced by his unusual seriousness in politics and policing, and she weaves between infallible and stupid in a way that should be more common in this genre than it is. But the Dodd's have always been at the heart of this series, and the decision both to set much of the story from Janet's POV, and to deal seriously with the sergeant's PTSD and truama induced violence works extremely well. Dodd's single-mindedness had become a joke in the last couple of books, and turning it around here to being the kind of reaction that creates todays suicide bombers was a bold choice she pulls off flawlessly (No, Dodd does not become a suicide bomber! they didn't have those in the marches!)
Similarly, her historical read on James I, another man marked by PTSD, but with a completely different response, a fanatical commitment to peace, is interesting, and I am loving to see where she goes with this.
Chisholm's Carey is a magnificent creation, his foppishness and idiocy in love balanced by his unusual seriousness in politics and policing, and she weaves between infallible and stupid in a way that should be more common in this genre than it is. But the Dodd's have always been at the heart of this series, and the decision both to set much of the story from Janet's POV, and to deal seriously with the sergeant's PTSD and truama induced violence works extremely well. Dodd's single-mindedness had become a joke in the last couple of books, and turning it around here to being the kind of reaction that creates todays suicide bombers was a bold choice she pulls off flawlessly (No, Dodd does not become a suicide bomber! they didn't have those in the marches!)
Similarly, her historical read on James I, another man marked by PTSD, but with a completely different response, a fanatical commitment to peace, is interesting, and I am loving to see where she goes with this.
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