Rough Music

Starred review from February 25, 2019
In Blake’s outstanding fifth 18th-century whodunit featuring coroner Titus Cragg and Dr. Luke Fidelis (after 2016’s Skin and Bone), army veteran Harry Hawk and brothers Simon and Charlie Stirk decide that Anne Gargrave must be punished for being a shrew. The trio strip off most of her clothes before tying her to a stool nailed to a wooden beam and parading their humiliated victim through the East Lancashire town of Accrington. By the end of the day, Gargrave lies dead in the road. Meanwhile, Cragg arrives in the area with his savvy wife, Elizabeth, and their infant son, having decided to move residences temporarily to avoid having the child exposed to a contagious disease. When Fidelis joins him, the physician discovers that Gargrave died from inhaling mud as she lay on her face. Reports that Hawk may be an imposter, who assumed the real soldier’s identity, suggest that fear of discovery may have been behind Gargrave’s death. More suspicious deaths follow. Clever plotting and enjoyable characterizations make this entry a winner.

February 1, 2019
A coroner with a philosophical bent and a physician with advanced views face some vexing 18th-century puzzles.As everyone around him in 1744 Lancashire worries about a possible new uprising in Scotland, County Coroner Titus Cragg can think only of protecting his baby from an outbreak of paralyzing fever. Upon the suggestion of his friend and colleague Dr. Luke Fidelis, he, his wife, Elizabeth, and baby Hector move to the village of Accrington, deep in the country and rarely visited by outsiders. They rent a small Dower House from Squire Thomas Turvey, a widower who lives with his invalid daughter, Thomasina, and is obsessed with bees. Their reception by the townsfolk is strangely cold until they learn of a recent incident in which shrewish Mrs. Gargrave drowned in a mud puddle after her rough treatment by a local mob re-enacting an ancient ritual. Cragg arranges an inquest and sends for Fidelis to view the body. Many joined in, but the event seemed to be instigated by Harry Hawk, who returned from his army service with his face so disfigured that Mrs. Gargrave suggested he was an imposter even though his wife accepted him. The bucolic village is far from peaceful. Turvey, who's fired Hawk as his assistant beekeeper, is quarreling with Mr. Horntree of Hatchfly Hall over a swarm of bees. Cragg and Fidelis find Horntree's beautiful and unhappy wife at the estate gatehouse, ill and possibly injured, before they're thrown out by her wrathful husband. The jury in the Gargrave case fights verbally and then physically before tendering a verdict of death by cause unknown. After Mrs. Horntree runs away and seeks help from Cragg and Fidelis but is taken in by Turvey, Cragg, acting as a referee for a violent annual contest, finds that Mrs. Horntree is not the lady she appears.Blake's (Skin and Bone, 2016, etc.) highly original mystery with a masterly denouement is made all the more absorbing by the skillfully wrought historical background.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 1, 2019
Coroner Titus Cragg feels such deep love for his infant son, Hector, that he moves his family temporarily from the Lancashire town of Preston to the village of Accrington to avoid the spread of the paralyzing fever that is crippling and killing children in the summer of 1744. But Accrington is no refuge for Cragg and his friend, Dr. Luke Fidelis, who find one suspicious death after another to investigate. Just before the Craggs arrive, Anne and John Gargrave are tormented by their fellow villagers, accompanied by rough music, or noise, she for being a shrew and he for being henpecked, after which she is found dead. Cragg probes the attitudes and enmities of the rural folk, even calming them on the verge of taking the law into their own hands to hang a presumed murderer, as deaths unaccountably mount in the area. The fifth in this series continues to bring Georgian England to life, with eighteenth-century practices that show sparks of contemporary forensic science. Cragg and Fidelis make a fine team, even as they occasionally exasperate each other. A fine historical mystery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)