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A review by tessisreading2
The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse: An Extraordinary Edwardian Case of Deception and Intrigue by Piu Marie Eatwell
3.0
This book is a Catherine Bailey-style expose of strange mysteries of the bygone rich and famous. Unfortunately, Catherine Bailey generally manages to come to some sort of Big Revelation by the end of her books (don't ask me how, I guess she just picks her subjects really well). This book kind of... petered out. There are too many twists that take the book in totally different directions, and Eatwell persevered with the thriller style of writing rather than the life-and-times style of writing. So for example she whisks through the crazy history of Anna Maria (who was convinced her late father-in-law was the duke) with far fewer digressions than she could have. Seriously, this woman was in the poorhouse for a while; she was clearly mentally unstable; I'd have enjoyed a little more background to that, but instead we keep whizzing through the Grand Mystery of whether the duke was also the shopkeeper. I wasn't always wild about the tone used - I suspect that the parts on extramarital relationships in the Victorian era were wildly simplified and, for example, she discusses Wilkie Collins, who had what she persists in referring to as his "official mistress" as well as another mistress by whom he had children... but she doesn't explain any of it, making it seem weirder and more confusing than it needs to be. (He didn't believe in the institution of marriage but he and the "official mistress" essentially lived together as a married couple. There. Wikipedia's taken care of it.)
The author also wrote as a straight historical narrative, with occasional foreshadowing, rather than inserting herself-as-researcher into the narrative from moment one. The problem with this is that the mystery just isn't quite mysterious enough; the straight historical narrative seems a little too obvious in its conclusions to the modern eye, surfeited as it is with Wilkie Collins and nightly doses of CSI. And when, towards the end, we come to the section that is about the author, it just feels extraneous. The book as a whole was well-written and interesting, but the pacing was off. The focus on the Mystery to the exclusion of the times and background, I think, hurt the book. But an interesting read overall.
The author also wrote as a straight historical narrative, with occasional foreshadowing, rather than inserting herself-as-researcher into the narrative from moment one. The problem with this is that the mystery just isn't quite mysterious enough; the straight historical narrative seems a little too obvious in its conclusions to the modern eye, surfeited as it is with Wilkie Collins and nightly doses of CSI. And when, towards the end, we come to the section that is about the author, it just feels extraneous. The book as a whole was well-written and interesting, but the pacing was off. The focus on the Mystery to the exclusion of the times and background, I think, hurt the book. But an interesting read overall.