Mistress of the Art of Death is a historical thriller surrounding the grisly murders of several children in Cambridge.
King Henry II is not happy as along with the awfulness of the murders, the Jewish community on whom he relies for a lot of his income have been blamed for the murders and have had to hide out in his castle in fear of their lives from the angry villagers.
Henry is driven to ask his friend and ally the King of Sicily for assistance which he sends in the form of Simon, a formidable Jewish investigator, Mansur an Arabic servant and Adelia Aguilar, a female doctor who specializes in what is basically forensics but which they call at the time the Art of Death.
Although In Salerno in Sicily, female doctors are quite common, this is not the case in twelfth century England, and therefore Mansur has to travel as the doctor with Adelia being his 'wisewoman' assistant. This proves difficult
for Adelia at times when she sees someone suffering and knows she can help them but has to wait on Mansur to turn up and then go through a charade where, to those looking on, she is asking Mansur's advice but is usually swearing profusely. However this is quite a dangerous time for Adelia for if any suspected that she and not Mansur was the doctor the prejudice against females in this line of business is so strong, that she would most probably be tried as a witch and killed.
However Adelia doesn't let these dangers deter her, and together with Simon and Mansur plus some new friends she makes along the way especially Gyltha a local village woman and her son Ulf, proceeds with her investigations which brings her ever closer to the killer and danger.
There is also the regular appearance of the King's tax collector Sir Rowley which is very unsettling for Adelia who normally remains aloof from everyone apart from her adopted father. Sir Rowley also seems to be very interested in Adelia's investigations, but whose side is he on really?
As the investigations continue a profile of the suspect grows gradually until the conclusion is made that the killer is still among them, which leads to a race in trying to track down the killer before any more murders can happen. But as the net closes in on the killer have Adelia and her friends become targets themselves?
When I first saw this book I was not too sure if I wanted to read it, as although I do like historical thrillers I wasn't too sure about the victims being children. The investigations and the story are quite interesting but I found that I had to skip the bits about the murders and the forensics, being too squeamish to read those parts. Thankfully there are only a few of these in the book. Apart from that it was an interesting read, although because of a romance element thrown in, it did get a bit Mills & Boonish sometimes which I found a bit tedious after a while. However the characterisations are good with a good interweaving of the various personalites with the suspense being kept up throughout the novel by the number of possible suspects that appear throughout the book and the identity of the murderer not being revealed until quite near the end.
Ariana Franklin is the pseudonym of the author Diana Norman who is married to the film critic Barry Norman. Her father was a journalist and she followed in his footsteps having a successful career until she give up her job to get married. Other titles under the name of Ariana Franklin include City of Shadows, False Knight On The Road, and The Death Maze. Under the name of Diana Norman her titles include A Catch of Consequence, Blood Royal, Taking Liberties, and The Vizard Mask.
I would recommend this book if you like a chilling medieval mystery although I have to warn again that ,although you find out about the murders after the fact, the results of these murders during Adelia's investigations leave little to the imagination and were too much for me and I had to skip them. But these occur only for a small amount of the whole novel.
Available on Amazon for £9.09 (hardback) Available on Play.com for £9.99
Please note this review relates to the novel and not the audio book
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Oct 6th, 2007
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