Review: Thornbound

Thornbound by Stephanie Burgis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Starts very strong, with a motivated protagonist in a dynamic situation, one of the best ways to begin a novel. For me, it didn't quite sustain that momentum, and there were one or two things I didn't believe along the way, but it's a sound piece of work nonetheless.

The characters are varied and distinct, and have a good combination of flaws and strengths. The irritating man with no social skills is fully believable, and so is the woman whose manipulation and insinuation go far beyond cattiness to outright malevolence. The characters who firmly believe that the protagonist, Cassandra, is being selfish and foolish in establishing a school to educate women in magic, when that's been the province of men for 17 centuries, are believable in their opinions; they think that this will undermine the whole social order by destroying the balance between the matriarchy that rules the country and the male magicians that support them, and that it will inevitably lead to dominance by men, as in every other country in the world. I wouldn't be too surprised if the author had taken inspiration from the arguments of 19th-century campaigners against votes for women.

There is a small, subtle - I might even say quibbling - worldbuilding misstep, or it seems that way to me. The country is called "Angland," implying an Anglo-Saxon conquest, which doesn't completely square with an uninterrupted 1700-year government established by the Britannic Celtic leader Boudicca. Also in worldbuilding, there are several characters who appear (by their names and descriptions) to be of at least partial South Asian descent, implying a British Empire that includes India, but that's never made explicit; they don't appear to face any discrimination, at least not from the characters we see, but that's not to say there is none. Otherwise, it's the same premise I've seen done by various other authors: Britain borders on the fae realm in some way, magic exists, no more worldbuilding is considered necessary.

The plot I felt was a bit of a muddle, but that's partly because Cassandra's life is a bit of a muddle. She's newly married, but her husband was called away from their wedding breakfast to fight fires for the Boudiccate (the government), which is his duty as a magical officer; however, they've kept him away from her for six weeks, in an attempt to make him resign and/or pressure her to give up on her idea of a magic school for women. She's been operating on little sleep during this time, getting the school ready. The school is just at the point of opening, and the Boudiccate drops a surprise inspection team on her, including an old enemy who would vote against her even if doing so involved setting herself on fire, and an old family friend who seems to be under some constraint to also vote against her, and may also genuinely believe it's a bad idea that will crash society. Cassandra has hired a weather wizard to cover the one subject she can't teach herself, and he's a huge pain as a human being. And on top of that, someone has made a dangerous bargain with the fae who inhabit the nearby wood. Also, one member of the inspection team - the junior member - is secretly engaged to one of the new school's students, and because it's a rule that to join the Boudiccate you have to be married to a mage, they both have a lot at stake in the success of the school, but at the same time it's going to be difficult to defy her seniors and vote in favour of the school, and her single vote won't swing it. (Same-sex marriage isn't a problem; female mages are.)

It's possibly a bit too much plot compressed into too small a space, and I felt it could have been given more room to breathe.

On that must-be-married-to-a-mage issue, there's something I need to discuss in spoiler tags, which seemed too convenient to me. (view spoiler)[The protagonist's sister Amy is married to a non-mage, and hasn't been able to follow her late mother-in-law into the Boudiccate as a result. As part of the resolution of the book, a newly-disgraced member of the Boudiccate has to resign - it's unclear to me exactly what, out of several possible things, will be announced as the reason, but it's something that will reduce her standing - and apparently she gets a vote on her exit to choose her successor, which is going to go to Amy. And this is apparently all that's needed to get Amy the position - it's spoken of as a done deal, despite the fact that she's married to a non-mage, which was previously presented as a huge problem, and will be going in with only the sponsorship of someone who is having to resign in disgrace, and is related to and openly supports Cassandra, who everyone thinks is a dangerous radical. I didn't buy it. (hide spoiler)]

A book with imperfections, then, but with a solid central core, and it just makes the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list. I've read the next novella in the series previously, and I do enjoy the world and its inhabitants, and will probably read more about them in due course.

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Review: John Thorndyke's Cases related by Christopher Jervis and edited by R. Austin Freeman

John Thorndyke's Cases related by Christopher Jervis and edited by R. Austin Freeman by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At the end of the first book, Jervis, the narrator, changes his situation in a way that would be a spoiler for that book, so here come the spoiler tags: (view spoiler)[he gets engaged (hide spoiler)]. This second volume in the series is a collection of short stories, and, presumably not finding that situation interesting anymore, the author gets around it in various ways. The first story is set prior to the first book (thus contradicting that book when it shows us that Jervis didn't know what Thorndyke was doing these days, hadn't been in touch with him for some time, and hadn't met his lab assistant); another story has Jervis go back to his previous job as a locum in order to put him in the midst of a mystery; most of them just ignore the situation entirely. Also largely ignored is Thorndyke's other job, as a lecturer; it doesn't ever seem to prevent him from going off to investigate something, and indeed seldom gets mentioned. It's therefore what I term a "superhero job".

The mysteries are not necessarily as colourful as the Holmes cases, but they are varied and clever and thoroughly researched, including actual scientific microphotographs of things like hair and seafloor sand. They're at the beginning of the forensic detective genre, and indeed of forensic science being a thing (Thorndyke is called a "medico-legal expert," but he's what we'd call a forensic scientist; he consults, rather than being part of the police force), and the emphasis is definitely on the clever unwinding of the case. Because Thorndyke always plays his cards close to his chest, and because his Watson, Jervis, is a bit obtuse (often missing things that were obvious to me), we don't get to see the great detective's chain of reasoning until he reveals it at the end of the story.

In contrast to the author's contemporary and partial namesake, Freeman Wills Crofts, the intelligence is mostly on the part of the detective, rather than the criminals; the crimes are often quite mundane once unwound, but the point is that they would have been misinterpreted if Thorndyke hadn't got involved. His specialty is rescuing suspects from wrongful conviction, some of them having been framed by the actual criminal, while others just happen to be in the vicinity of the crime (or, in one case, accident, as it turns out) with an apparent motive. Justice is done, not by the conviction of the guilty (at least not onscreen), but by the exoneration of the innocent.

Though I could wish for a slightly higher proportion of character development to cleverness sometimes, these are enjoyable, and I will keep reading the series.

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Review: The Red Thumb Mark

The Red Thumb Mark by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first of a series featuring a scientific detective, John Thorndyke, whose science and reasoning were, honestly, better than Sherlock Holmes, on whom he is clearly based. He's a medico-legal expert, and the books are written as if they're told by his Watson equivalent - also a doctor, brighter than Holmes's Watson, though nothing compared with Thorndyke.

It's an interesting premise: Diamonds have gone missing from a safe, and there's a big honking clue in the form of a fingerprint in blood that matches the safe owner's nephew. Problem is, nobody who knows the nephew believes for a second that he would do such a thing, but fingerprint evidence is generally taken as utterly compelling and incontrovertible. Enter Thorndyke, who looks beneath the surface and discovers, and eventually demonstrates brilliantly in court, that this isn't always the case.

Thorndyke keeps his plans and insights under wraps even from his assistants, so we keep reading in order to find out what they are. I did guess the culprit very early on, and even had a good idea how it might have been done (though not in the detail Thorndyke presents), but I had the motive wrong. My suspicions got stronger as the villain attacked Thorndyke with the intention of killing him and removing his contribution to the case (since only he knew what he was working on); this gave some action to the story. There was also a romance subplot, stronger and more developed than in a lot of books of the period, and because I liked both the course and resolution of it, that compensated somewhat for the fact that I'd guessed the culprit and their method.

Overall, the character work is better than average for the time, and the mystery is enjoyable and unusual, and I'll be reading more in this series. Some modern readers may find the highly-educated prose, with occasional Latin tags and quotations from English literature, offputting; it's the kind of thing Wodehouse parodied in Jeeves and Wooster, where Bertie always gets it wrong. But it's just the way that educated men of the era talked among themselves, and personally, I didn't mind it; it didn't reach the level of seeming pretentious.

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Review: The Cask

The Cask by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first novel by Freeman Wills Crofts, and it has both similarities to and differences from his later works. The main thing that's the same is that the criminal is highly intelligent and capable and comes up with a complicated plot that initially baffles the investigators, but, by dogged perseverance, they eventually solve it. The main difference is a spoiler: (view spoiler)[The police investigation comes up with the wrong suspect, and a private detective ends up solving the mystery. In the author's other books that I've read, the pattern is more like: amateurs (who aren't detectives) investigate for a while, rather haphazardly, and then the police come in and do a professional job and wrap up the case. (hide spoiler)]

The appeal in this author's books is the puzzle or mystery, rather than the characters and their interactions, and the systematic approach to solving the mystery can become tedious at times. Also, in this case at least, there are multiple people who are involved in the solution, so there isn't a single protagonist that we follow all the way through. Among the careful checking of alibis and interviewing carters, porters, and other witnesses are a couple of action scenes, but mostly it's very procedural.

There's a scene, too, where a couple of things don't make sense. The detective is interviewing an informant, a typist who has been laid off, and observes that her good dress shows that her loss of employment hasn't placed her in want. However, she only lost her job a few weeks before, and presumably bought the dress while still employed, so it doesn't show anything of the kind. Also, when asked if she can prove that she worked for a particular firm for two years, she says she can't, but later in the same scene hands over a reference letter which proves exactly that. It has the feel of a scene that was added late and not properly revised or thought through, though of course I have no way of verifying that guess.

Otherwise, though, it's a meticulously crafted puzzle with some twists and turns, and an intriguing mystery. Not as good as this author's books later became, which is to be expected from a first novel, but I can see why it was popular enough that he kept writing.

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Review: The Pit-Prop Syndicate

The Pit-Prop Syndicate by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A clever mystery, with an unusual kick-off: A young Englishman, travelling on business across France, notices a lorry-driver surreptitiously changing the number on his lorry. Intrigued, and also needing petrol for his motorcycle, he approaches the mill from which the driver had come, and meets an attractive young woman. On his return to London, he tells the story in his club, and one of his friends, suspecting there's more to the story, suggests they investigate. For the sake of the young woman, who he's fallen in love with, the original young Englishman is reluctant to involve the police, but when there's a murder they have to call in Scotland Yard and put their investigations to date in the hands of the inspector in charge.

The first half is the two friends investigating in a kind of Boy's Own Paper way, while the second half is the professional investigation led by the Scotland Yard inspector in a straight police procedural. There's still plenty of suspense and mystery left, though; exactly what crime the Syndicate of the title is committing isn't clear until late in the book, and the reason for the changing of the number plate isn't explained until even later, so that kept me, as a reader, on the hook. The romance subplot and the character of the love interest are severely underdeveloped, as was the style at the time, but the fascination of the mystery makes up for any flaws, and it's a solid, entertaining book of the period (about a century ago).

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Review: Inspector French's Greatest Case

Inspector French's Greatest Case by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Inspector French starred in a number of books, of which I read the second one ( Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery ) first. They are completely self-contained, and I didn't feel that reading them out of order made any difference.

These are early police procedurals, written by an engineer, with all the thoroughness and rigour that implies. These days, people who write police procedurals usually make the investigating officer quirky or eccentric in some way and often have some interpersonal dynamics going on as well, so that it's not just working through a series of investigative procedures, but that isn't how these are written. Since reading this one but before reviewing it, I've read another one and a half books by the same author, and although the inspectors are not Inspector French, they might as well be; they're interchangeable bland Everymen, and any personal relationships they have are entirely generic. If there's a romance subplot, it's at about the usual level for a male author of the time: very little on-screen time is devoted to developing it, so the courtship takes place over a short time period and the female love interest never gets to exhibit much personality. This book doesn't actually have such a subplot, though the second in the series does, and so does The Pit-Prop Syndicate .

What this author does, then, to hold the reader's interest, is to make the mystery itself so mysterious and intriguing that you want to see it solved, and also throw in some adventure or thriller elements. In this case, there are missing diamonds, disguises, false identities, a profusion of red herrings, and chases around Europe. It's entertaining and compelling at that level, so I hardly missed the characterization and relationship development that you'd get in a more modern book of this type. This author's criminals always seem to be highly intelligent and good planners, just not quite good enough to evade the detectives, and that makes for a pleasing mystery.

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Review: Claws and Contrivances

Claws and Contrivances by Stephanie Burgis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed the first in this series, featuring the sister of this one's heroine, and this book is equally fun. It does stretch plausibility to the utmost in order that certain revelations can come at dramatic moments; the hero doesn't realise for 75% of the book that the heroine is the person he has a letter for (from her sister, updating her on the events of Book 1), because he gets her surname wrong and she never quite finishes correcting him in the course of their hectic conversations in the middle of various crises, and even when he does figure it out, he doesn't actually give her the letter until the 92% mark, because he doesn't want to distract her from her plans to foil the villain. There are always reasons for these unlikely delays and miscommunications - it's not just "so the plot can happen" - but it did strain my suspension of disbelief almost to the breaking point. It makes for a fun plot, though, and I forgive it.

Apart from one "into" that should be "in to" (yes, it matters), I spotted no mechanical errors apart from the fact that, by my count, there should be 26 fewer commas than there are - mostly between adjectives, because hardly anyone knows the coordinate comma rule. This doesn't quite count as "well edited" by my standards, but it's close. The Regency setting, as in the first book, feels more authentic than most Regency romances (despite the presence of small dragons with magic powers); it's not just 21st-century people shoved into crinolines. But, again as with the first book, the form the hero's admiration takes for the heroine - listening to her seriously and respecting her abilities - is modern, while also feeling like it fits into the time period. By the way, that's also a much healthier standard of interaction between hero and heroine than you'll find in the average Regency romance (or, probably, the average romance of any period, including contemporary; I mostly restrict my romance reads to Regency, fantasy, or, as in this case, both, so I can't say this for sure, but that's the impression I've gained).

The plot is a delight, lurching from one crisis to another, mostly caused by the characters being who they are: the heroine is principled and devoted to looking after others ahead of herself, the hero principled and absent-minded, the heroine's cousins include an airhead dramatic fan of Gothic romance and a bluff and confident and basically out lesbian (inasmuch as you could be an out lesbian in the early 19th century), and the villain is an avaricious and manipulative rake. The dragons are cute, the resolution is satisfying, and I look forward to the third book.

I'm confident that there will be a third book, because there's a third sister, the earnest but dreamy mathematician Harry. I thought when I finished the first book that she would be paired with the hero of this book, the earnest but dreamy dragon expert Mr Aubrey, but I now see that the author is smarter than I am; that would have been too much dreaminess all in one place. The hero of the first book has a handsome brother, who I initially thought would end up with the heroine of this book, so... we shall see.

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