[Book Review] A Serpent's Tale, by Ariana Frankliln

A Serpent's Tale

Ariana Frankliln

Mistress of the Art of Death Mystery Series

The Fair Rosamund is dead, poisoned by an unknown hand. The Bishop, Adelia Aguilar's former lover and the father of her child, asks her to investigate the murder in order to avoid a civil war between the king, Henry II, and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who is bound to be blamed.  Enter the famous labyrinth and a severe and crippling blizzard and you have all the props and plot twists you need for this CSI Oxfordshire episode.

This was my first Adelia Aquilar mystery, and I did mostly like Adelia herself.  She is all about her intelligenc and not at all fashion obsessed, unlike the Ursula Blanchards of the historical fictional world.  I liked the era too, the 12th century, and found the characters as an ensemble pretty satisfying.

I would venture to say the clues were just too easy, as I pretty much figured it all out about halfway through the novel.  There seemed to be a lot of cross-dressing going on, with underlying hints of homosexual relationships, both male and female.  That, I reasoned, had to be a clue or the book was just sloppy.  The former proved to be the case. 

Throw in some proto-feminism and a whole lot of "royal worship", ascribing far sighted and progressive qualities to Eleanor and Henry II, and you basically have this novel.  There is a phenomenon among many women readers, I have discovered, of extraordinary attachment to certain kings.  The most notable, of course, is the Ricardian Obsession, i.e. Richard III.  Then there are the Edward II groupies.  This was my first exposure to Henry II worship.  It seemed as if Franklin would not thank anyone for mentioning Thomas à Becket, whom she assails bitterly not only in the novel but in her author's note.

This was an easy read, satisfying most of the time, a little creepy in places.. everyone has their bugaboo issue in reading.. child sexual abuse, rape, in my case, animal cruelty featuring a cat, and this book has mine.  I skipped that part, something I once told another reviewer disqualified her from reviewing... mea culpa.  For some reason Franklin made Rosamund fat, perhaps to show that henry preferred women who were ample and comfortable, as opposed to Eleanor's sharpness.

I downloaded the novel from National Library Services' BARD site.