I found it slow to start, picking up the pace around page 200, but then felt very let down by the ending. But really, I didn’t think there was enough plot to fill 500+ pages. Indeed, while Adelia works out where to find the killer, she doesn’t have a clue who it is until… well, that’ll be a spoiler so I won’t mention that bit. It’s an investigation into who is the local repellant nutjob, and it’s a guessing game. OK, to be fair, we don’t have the killer’s point of view sections that usually make me stop reading, but this isn’t what I consider a mystery. Imagine if you will one of those nasty serial killer books that I occasionally bang on about transposed to a medieval setting, and you’ve got the plot of this book. While The Death Maze was a decent little mystery, this isn’t. There’s a “but” coming, you can tell, can’t you? The setting is also vivid, and the fear in the darkness, the Rakshasa, is pretty terrifying at times – in particular in the chapter when one character describes how he chased the killer across Europe. We get an insight into most of them at times, Adelia most of all, obviously, and clearly Franklin has put a lot of thought into the development of them. The characters, in particular the leads and their friends are very well presented. But as they become accepted into the Cambridge community, it seems that the killer, the hideous Rakshasa, has not finished his deadly business… and it seems that he has set his sights beyond mere children… Enter, from Salerno, Adelia Aguilar, Mansur and Simon, a team of investigators – Simon being the sleuth, Adelia the pathologist and Mansur the muscle, and also the shield that Adelia has to hide her talents behind. Fearing a massive loss of taxation, King Henry II sends for help. So much so that two are executed and the rest isolated in the castle. Hurrah for ‘Nother Chance November.Ĭhildren are being murdered in horrific ways in the vicinity of Cambridge and the local villagers are blaming the Jews. So, in my typical timely manner, nineteen months and a bit late, I get round to Mistress of the Art of Death, the book that introduces the character and her band of merry followers. That was how I described The Death Maze, the second book in the series by the late Ariana Franklin concerning Adelia Aguilar, the first female anatomist. “The first decent historical mystery of the blog so far.”

Mistress of the art of death