Days of Atonement

I always pick up interesting historical mystery novels during my trips to Canada, and this past July I came home with a U.K. edition of Days of Atonement (Faber & Faber, 2007) by Michael Gregorio, which apparently is a pseudonym for a husband-and-wife team of writers.  This is the second in a series, and while I liked it well enough, it didn't grab me so intensely that I'm likely to make a big effort to hunt up the others.  That's a bit of a disappointment, since it's set during the first decade of the nineteenth century, which is a favorite era of mine and the reason I bought the book.  It's set in Prussia, freshly invaded by Napoleon and currently enduring both an uneasy coexistence with the French occupiers and an outright rebellion by marginalized former army troops.

The mystery itself is rather well done, though I missed a great, big, obvious clue early on that would probably have made me twig to the big reveal rather more quickly than I did.  It's one of those clues that is a total giveaway, if one happens to notice it.  I didn't.  As it was, I caught on at just the right point, only slightly before the in-story sleuth, a Prussian magistrate with an obsession with violent crime.  And the final twist was a genuine surprise.

The story: a family is destroyed.  Three children are slaughtered, drained of blood and genitally mutilated.  Their father is mysteriously killed at his army base.  And the mother has disappeared, feared dead.  A local hunter is suspected, but suspicion rapidly falls on the local Jewish community due to the disappearance of most of the children's blood (the classic anti-Semitic blood libel).  The magistrate alternately cooperates and competes with a French investigator while his wife, distraught since the invasion, seems to be hiding something: a knowledge of the murders?  An attraction to the Frenchman?

The mystery is good enough that I won't give away any plot details, and the book is well-written.  But it's definitely slow to really get started; I put it down half a dozen times before finally getting involved in the story.  The historical detail is fairly modest, though accurate as far as I can tell, except perhaps in the transgender prostitute (a topic that I have no knowledge of in early-19thc Prussia).  And the characters just did not grab me.  The narrative told me that the magistrate felt competitive with the French investigator and was prone to fits of violent anger, but I wasn't really convinced of either.  I read it, but I didn't really feel it.  I had similar problems with most of the other characters, other than the violent and semi-crazy inhabitants of the army base.

I think I should offer a mild gore warning: first there's the description of the murdered children and later some real gross-out bits about intestinal worms, the reconstruction of a battered corpse, and the exhumation of a decomposed infant.  It's not nightmare-inducing or anything but it's definitely got some ick factor going.

Overall...I recommend it for the clever mystery, the pace of which picks up nicely partway through, or for anyone with a particular interest in the French occupation of Prussia.  It's a decent book, just not one I could really love.

Comments

[Serge]

I missed a great, big, obvious clue early on that would probably have made me twig to the big reveal rather more quickly than I did

That reminds me of a mystery written by Sheri Tepper (as BJ Oliphant) that I read years ago. Early on, the main character comes across something that I thought should have been suspicious, but which the MC dismissed - until the very end, where it turned out to be what finally made her figure out who the murderer was. As the MC was a very smart woman, the mystery was sustained only because Tepper resorted to the idiot plot.

That being said... When I started reading your post, my first thought was that this was another historical disguising itself as a mystery because that's the only way they could get it published. I read on and found that I had been wrong. As for the writing, would you say that it's a case of violating the show-don't-tell rule?