Impressed by The Tavern In The Morning and wanting to see how it all began, I ordered this, the first book in the Hawkenlye Mystery series, and was not disappointed.
Richard Plantagenet, to be known to history as the Lionheart, has just inherited the throne of England from his detested father Henry II, and his adored mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine has launched a PR campaign in England in an attempt to make him popular prior to his forthcoming coronation at Westminster: for though Richard had been born in England "since childhood he had only visited England briefly. He hardly spoke English, and had only a vague notion of what the land and her people were all about. Home, to him, was Aquitaine, and his court was at Poitiers; the very name by which he was usually known in France was Richard the Poitevin."
One of Eleanor's less well-advised moves is to empty the jails of England in the name of the new king.
Naturally, when a young nun is raped and murdered, everyone blames the recently released prisoners, and Eleanor's plan back-fires. So Richard sends a French knight, Josse d'Aquin, to England to solve the murder and, more importantly, absolve the king and his mother from all blame.
There he meets the redoubtable but very human Helewise, abbess of Hawkenlye Abbey, where the murdered nun had been nearing the completion of her time as a postulant. And so is born the Josse-Helewise team, Josse the action man, Helewise the thinker, with their unspoken platonic love, which will form the core of the Hawkenlye novels.
An excellent start to what is proving to be an outstanding series.
One gripe though. As I have observed elsewhere, we are always being told that self-published POD (print-on-demand) paperbacks and e-books (books in digital format) are carelessly edited and full of misprints. Now, I read a lot of books, both books which, like this one, are produced by major publishers, and self-published books; and I would go so far as to say that the reverse is now true. Most of the books I read contain misprints, and the worst culprits are the so-called editors working behind the scenes for the major publishers. NEL/Hodder & Stoughton/ Hodder-Headline is far from being the only offender and this book is nowhere near the worst example I have seen recently, but it does contain as many as two misprints on one page (eg p126, "at least" for "at last", and "any, anyway" for "and, anyway"); and surely someone with editorial pretensions should know the difference between the First Person and the Third Person? Richard, the King, is speaking:
'My mother asks me to convey my personal thanks to you, Aquin, for the service that you rendered to us last summer, while we prepared for our coronation,' Richard said, experiencing, Josse noted, some difficulty over deciding whether he was going to use the first or third person. Perhaps, Josse thought charitably, being King took a deal of getting used to.
This should read "deciding whether he was going to use the first person singular or plural," I or we, me or us.
Alys, it's a great story, but you must never trust the Spell-check or some half-educated editor still wet behind the ears to do your work for you. (You can tell I'm a teacher, can't you!)
JM
