Book Review: Of Manners and Murder by Anastasia Hastings ***1/2

Of Manners and Murder by Anastasia Hastings
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Violet Manville, spirited, intelligent, not the type to suffer fools gladly, and most unforgivably in Victorian society, not possessed of a large fortune, is not the type of young lady who is in great demand as a wife. Luckily, she doesn’t care and is happy to leave that type of thing to her younger half-sister Sephora, who is beautiful, flirtatious, and an heiress. Even she, however, is somewhat daunted when her Aunt Adelia leaves on holiday and informs her that she is expected to take up Adelia’s role as “Miss Hermione,” one of the country’s popular “agony aunts,” or in modern parlance, an advice columnist.

When one of the first letters she opens is from Ivy Armstrong, a new young wife who has experienced several "accidents" and believes that someone is trying to kill her, Violet is concerned enough that she sets off to meet with her, only to discover that she has arrived too late. Almost no one, however, seems to seriously think that Ivy was murdered, attributing her death to either suicide or accident. Violet determines to prove that she was and soon finds herself in danger from a killer who is determined not to be caught. Meanwhile, Sephora, from whose point of view some chapters are told, is involved in a secret romance that has a surprising (if somewhat far-fetched) connection to the situation.

Despite that, as well as a few other things that seemed like a stretch, like well-bred young ladies being out and about unattended, I enjoyed Of Manners and Murder very much. I liked Violet and Bundy, her aunt’s servant, who serves as a sort of Watson for her, and even Sephora, while immature, has potential. I look forward to the next in the series. 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4.

I received a copy of Of Manners and Murder from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

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Book Review: The Vatican Candidate by Paul Bryers ****

The Vatican Candidate: A Harper & Blake Mystery by Paul Bryers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Paul Bryers’ The Vatican Candidate begins from the point of view of an elderly priest living in Sicily, as his idyllic day is interrupted by a violent intrusion. Then it switches to the US, where researcher Hannah Harper is interviewing for a job as assistant to historian Michael Blake, whose fame comes from his books about the persistence of Nazi beliefs and similar (white supremacist) ideas through time and how they continually reemerge. (These books sound fascinating - I would read them if they existed in our world!)

Hannah gets the job, but when she goes to see Michael at his home, she finds his body and that of his partner in a gruesome tableau. The police write it off as a murder-suicide, but Hannah is attacked in her own home soon afterward and when she meets Michael’s brother Aiden, she finds that the official explanation has also left him unconvinced. He believes that it has something to do with the topic of Michael’s next book and hires Hannah to help him investigate what his brother had been working on. Their search takes them to Germany, the Tyrol, and finally to Sicily, where the connection to the earlier massacre is at last revealed. The current Pope, already despised and distrusted among the far right, has decided to open the Vatican archives, which it has always been rumored will contain evidence of collaboration between the Nazis and the highest levels of the Church, and in certain circles, it has been determined that this must not be allowed to happen.

As with most instances of this type of book, there is another murder along the way in which our main characters are implicated, and they find themselves on the run as they race to discover the connection between a flight by a celebrated German aviatrix out of besieged Berlin in 1945 and the modern-day conspiracy. The story was wound up well and the characters had a certain amount of chemistry, though refreshingly no unresolved sexual tension that I noticed. I did find Hannah’s constant testiness at Aiden a bit annoying, although to be fair he did seem to fail to keep her informed about what he was up to without any good reason. He was by far the more interesting character to me. I also appreciated the historical note from the author at the end telling about the real events on which the novel is based.

I received a copy of The Vatican Candidate from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

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