qKate Ellis, The Plague Maiden (Piatkus, 2004)
Filthy, uncultured American that I am, I sometimes miss out on what's going on overseas where mysteries are concerned. Thankfully, though, my mother is both a mystery fan and rather well-traveled, so I sometimes pick up a name here and there to check out. The most recent of these was Kate Ellis. I managed to track down an import copy of The Plague Maiden and got to reading.
As far as mysteries go, it's good stuff. Ellis' books (all of them, according to her website) combine a contemporary murder mystery with an historical event which also includes a murder mystery. Nice, that. After all, mystery novel detectives are usually working on two cases at once, anyway (and yet somehow can never figure out how they go together until the last fifty pages; figure that out for me, will you?). Why not set one four hundred years ago?
In this eighth installment, Detective Wesley Peterson has himself a nasty case of threatening; the manager of the local Huntings supermarket has received a threat. When it pans out, things start getting ugly. At the same time, Wesley's mate Neil is on an archaeological dig at a plague pit where a new Huntings is slated to go up, and finds a couple of skeletons who look rather like they didn't die of anything carried by fleas.
Ellis is quite good at integrating the history lessons into the storyline, something all too many authors fail miserably at, which makes The Plague Maiden a much easier read than one might expect, given that the author is going to be forced to do some explication for those of us not up on South Devon during the Black Plague. (How much of what's here is true, of course, I've no idea for that very reason; even if it's fabricated, the point is that it's well-meshed with the story.) The book is quite readable, and there are enough unexpected twists and turns to keep most mystery fans guessing. I've become a Kate Ellis convert, and will be reading more of her stuff as time goes on. *** ½
