Book Review Club: Lady Darby #Mystery Series by @AnnaLeeHuber

For this month’s Barrie Summy’s Book Review Club, I’m doing short reviews of a mystery series I’ve been enjoying this year featuring a female sleuths: Lady Darby.

The Anatomists's Wife coverThe Anatomist’s Wife
by Anna Lee Huber
Lady Darby Mystery Series, Book 1
Historical Mystery
Scotland, 1830

Keira, Lady Darby, is the widow of a notorious anatomist who married her because of her artistic talent and then forced her to illustrate his anatomy book by observing autopsies. There was a scandal after his death and her part became public knowledge. She has been hiding out at her sister and brother-in-law’s estate in Scotland, until her sister decides to throw a house party and all the old pain comes back. The other guests treat her with disdain and mutter about her behind her back. Then one of the female guests is murdered in a brutal fashion, and Keira is asked to help Sebastian Gage, who has some experience as an inquiry agent. Her anatomy training comes in handy, but she has a hard time dealing emotionally. Very engaging main character and excellent mystery.
Mortal Arts cover
Mortal Arts

by Anna Lee Huber
Lady Darby Mystery Series, Book 2
Historical Mystery
Scotland, 1830
Audiobook narrated by Heather Wilds

Mortal Arts is one of the most emotional mysteries I’ve ever read. In this book, Keira (Lady Darby) learns that a childhood friend who she thought had died was instead committed to an insane asylum nine years ago. Now he is out, but kept locked up at the family castle. Will may be Lord Dalmay, but is he stable enough to be around people? After serving in the military during the Napoleonic Wars, he came home with a severe case of PTSD, which was not understood at the time. Like Keira, he’s an artist who acted as her drawing master when she was a teen. She saw his troubled drawings then and sympathizes, esp. since her evil former husband had threatened her with a similar fate if she didn’t do what he wanted. Her protectiveness of Will interferes with her burgeoning relationship with Sebastian Gage, who shows up at Dalmay House also. Then a young local woman disappears. The specter of the asylum hangs over everything in this terrific mystery.

Heather Wilds’s narration is stellar. I especially love listening to the Scottish accents.

A Grave MatterA Grave Matter
by Anna Lee Huber
Lady Darby Mystery Series, Book 3
Historical Mystery
Scotland, 1831
Audiobook narrated by Heather Wilds

The story opens on New Year’s Eve, 1830, at a Hogmanay ball in the Scottish border country. Keira, Lady Darby, and her brother Trevor are in attendance at the home of their aunt and uncle. All is in preparation for the First Footing, in which a carefully chosen member of the household (a dark-haired man) is set to be the first person to cross the threshold after Midnight. (In Scottish tradition, the hair color of the first footer indicates whether good or bad luck will prevail in the coming year. A fair-haired man, or heaven forfend, a woman arriving first is Bad Luck.) Things go awry when a young red-headed man rushes into the hall to report a murder at nearby Dryburgh Abbey. A caretaker was shot to death when he disturbed grave robbers digging up the bones of the late Lord Buchan.

At her uncle’s bequest, Keira reluctantly writes to Sebastian Gage to ask him to investigate. Once again, they are thrown together and stumble into a puzzling conspiracy to steal and then ransom the bones of prominent Scotsmen. Grave robbing was fairly common in this era, though typically only recently buried graves were exhumed so the corpses could be sold to anatomists. Why someone would be stealing skeletons is a real puzzlement.

Keira and Gage’s romance heats up again, and his presence helps her to find her muse and start painting again, after weeks of struggling to put paint to canvas. Another good read/listen, though not as engrossing as the first two books.

(Dear FCC, I purchased all three of these books with my own money.)

Note: Trip to Harry Potter World was postponed, so I’ll be here to blog hop after all.

Linda

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Summer Reads: Historical Mysteries #amreading

My usual monthly Book Review Club is still on hiatus, but I thought I’d share some reviews anyway of four historical mysteries I read this summer.

Anatomist's Wife coverThe Anatomist’s Wife
by Anna Lee Huber,
Book 1 in the Lady Darby Mystery Series

Historical Mystery, Scotland 1830

My friend, Rebecca Anderson, recommended this book to me and I was glad she did.

Keira, Lady Darby, is the widow of a notorious anatomist who married her because of her artistic talent and then forced her to illustrate his anatomy book by observing autopsies. There was a scandal after his death and her part became public knowledge. She has been hiding out at her sister and brother-in-law’s estate in Scotland, until her sister decides to throw a house party and all the old pain comes back. The other guests treat her with disdain and mutter about her behind her back.

Then one of the female guests is murdered in a brutal fashion, and Keira is asked to help Nicholas Gage, who has some experience as an inquiry agent. Her anatomy training comes in handy, but she has a hard time dealing emotionally.

Very engaging main character and excellent mystery. I will read more in the series.

Maisy Dobbs Bundle 1 civer

Maisie Dobbs Bundle #1:
Pardonable Lies and Messenger of Truth

by Jacqueline Winspear
(actually books 3 & 4 in the series)

Setting: England in the early 1930s

I read the first two books in this series, Maisy Dobbs and Birds of a Feather and wanted more.

In Pardonable Lies, Maisie is asked to confirm the battlefield death of a man’s son, as well as to find out more about a friend’s brother who was reported missing, presumed dead, in WWI as well. It means Maisie must return to France and fight her own demons after being wounded at a battle station while nursing. And to make matters worse, someone wants her dead. I loved this book. I think it’s one of the best so far, after the first book which was excellent.

Messenger of Truth also revisits the specter of WWI. A female journalist, Georgina Bassington-Hope, asks Maisie to investigate whether her artist brother’s death was murder or a terrible accident. Maisie, who is a psychologist as well as an investigator, never does anything half way, so she ends up dredging up a lot of skeletons from the Bassington-Hope closets. Also good, but not quite as good as Pardonable Lies.

I do recommend this series to mystery readers looking for more depth of character than often found in series books.

Sovereign coverSovereign
(C. J. Sansom)
by C. J. Sansom,
Audiobook narrated by Stephen Crossley

When King Henry VIII goes on a progress to York, which rebelled the year before, Matthew is hired to assist with petitions from the Yorkers to the king. Henry is trying to consolidate his power and force the nobles to swear allegiance to him. Of course, nothing goes right for poor Matthew, a hunchback lawyer at Lincoln’s Inn. His father dies, so he and his assistant Jack Barak make a side trip to his old home, arriving a day late in York. Then a glazier removing stained glass from an abbey church falls into a wagon full of broken glass and dies after making a strange prediction about the king. Matthew can’t resist a mystery, so he sets out to investigate only to be foiled by higher up authorities, but not before Matthew uncovers an important clue, putting his life in danger.

This is a really long book, 676 pages in print, and 21 hours in audio, so it took me two months to finish. It’s really good though. Steven Crossley’s narration is excellent given the number of voices and accents involved.

Great series, though I recommend reading the books in order. The first one is Dissolution, set earlier in the reign of Henry VIII.

What have you been reading this summer?

Linda

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