Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin

I liked it so much that I didn’t even particularly care that Adelia seemed so anachronistic to me. Taking this solely as historical fiction, I just adored it. I suppose that some aspects were predictable – the character who commits the murders is always a suspicious character though I didn’t guess which one – but I never read mysteries for the whodunnit aspect. I’ve done what I normally don’t do and read reviews prior to composing my own, and have discovered that quite a few people thought the mystery was too predictable for the book to be interesting. I mean, I’m probably going to spend this entire review gushing about it mostly because I can’t help myself. Sometimes being unfamiliar with mysteries is useful, because I just loved this book. Adelia’s job is to find the murderer, without getting murdered herself.

The Jews have been blamed, of course, despite the fact that they’re obviously innocent, and they have even been killed by townspeople, so they are all holed up in the center of town. In short, she does autopsies, and her skills are essential to try and find out who has been taking and killing small children in Cambridge. Adelia is a mistress of the art of the death she “reads” bodies in order to find out exactly what happened to them. A rare female doctor, trained in Salerno, is recruited to head to England along with two men in order to solve an important crime.

Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin