Stephen Deas

Having quite enjoyed book 1 in this series I decided to read book 2. However, it doesn't quite hold up to the level of the first which had a few niggles in any case.

In this, the 'hero' has been unable to find his family as they had left their home before he could return and he has sunken into drunken depression. He is rescued by Cromwell's spy who takes him to Cromwell - they have another mission for him. This time it is to find the abducted sister of John Milton, better known in his own time for his pro-Parliamentarian firebrand writings than for the epic poems for which we remember him. The suspicion is that Royalists are behind the abduction but instead it turns out to be connected with events a few years previously when the sister's husband was supposedly lost in a battle.

Kate, the character I liked in book one, makes a reappearance now working as an archivist for Cromwell, trying to put together information on the whereabouts and fate of soldiers in the Parliamentarian armies. Therefore she is of help to the hero both in his quest for Milton's sister and his own personal search for his family. There is a hint of a thwarted romance on both sides with the awareness of his bond to his wife, as there was in book 1.

Somehow I found the situation less involving possibly because the action moves from place to place and there are a lot of different villains to dissipate the tension. It was an OK read, so 2 stars, but I'm not now drawn to looking for a third book if one exists.… (altro)

I have been interested in the English Civil War for a number of years and have read some non fiction about it but have only recently begun to read the growing number of crime novels set during the period. I quite liked this one but had a couple of problems with it: although the portrayal of Cromwell is very cameo, the notion that he was an opportunist who did not actually believe in the Puritan ethic flies in the face of a lot of the documentation of the time. I've certain read about his dark night of the soul periods when he prayed incessantly, convinced like a lot of committed Puritans that he was dammed irrespective of any good works etc that he might do. So that didn't square with ime. There were also a few phrases here and there which at the time jarred a bit as just too modern in phrasing, and the constant use of 'Miss' for the main female character in the book was very anachronistic as women of the period would have been addressed as Mistress - Miss is very nineteenth century.

Having said that, I quite liked the portrayal of some of the characters, especially the female lead, although the tendency to have similarly named characters such as two young men who were brothers but with different surnames which both began with 'W' was a bit confusing - eventually I gave up trying to keep them straight as it didn't particularly matter since both had died before the book's action commences. But otherwise quite an interesting read with some vivid descriptions of squalid deprivation in the middle of a seventeenth century winter after six years of devastating war. A solid 3 stars therefore.… (altro)