A TREASURY OF REGRETS, fourth Aristide Ravel mystery

A TREASURY OF REGRETS (Aristide Ravel #4)
SUSANNE ALLEYN
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Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: For police agent and investigator Aristide Ravel, the teeming streets and alleyways of Paris are a constant source of activity. And in the unruly climate of 1797, when gold and food are scarce, citizens will stop at very little to get what they need.
When Jeannette Moineau, an illiterate servant girl, is accused of poisoning the master of the house where she works, Ravel cannot believe she is guilty of the crime. With stubborn witnesses, a mysterious white powder, and stolen goods all stacked against her, however, he knows it will not be easy to clear her of the charges. But Ravel finds an unexpected ally in Laurence, a young widow of the house, whose past surprisingly intersects with his own.

In a large household brimming with bickering and resentment, everyone seems to have a motive for poisoning old Martin Dupont. But as more family members turn up dead, the list of suspects rapidly dwindles. Tensions rise and Ravel and Laurence must probe the secrets of the city's crafty politicians and confidence artists for clues to clear Jeannette's name. Finding information, though, in dissolute post-revolutionary Paris can lead to costly and dangerous demands.

From the author of Game of Patience comes a new historical mystery, bringing alive the sights and sounds of eighteenth-century Paris---brimming with atmospheric details, scandal, and murder.

My Review: The second published, and fourth in reading order, Aristide Ravel mystery, set in Revolutionary Paris, leads us deeper into the twisty byways of our sleuth's character and, at the same time, deeper into the vanished Paris that was so influential in the creation of the modern world.

I like series mysteries for reasons I've discussed elsewhere...orderly things, mysteries, and the recurring characters make the world feel a little less random than it actually is...but they come with some hazards. Writers under the pressure of deadlines sometimes make us feel as though they're phoning it in, characterization can dwindle to a series of overused tics (like Miss Silver's cough in all those Patricia Wentworth mysteries) or a catchphrase so overused as to make one want to scream blue murder (Hercule Poirot's "little gray cells" oh clam up already).

Alleyn avoids these pitfalls by enriching our understanding of Revolutionary France and its creators as well as our sleuth. This is a spolier, so stop reading if you're spoiler-averse:

**SPOILER**

Aristide, from the last book, is still mourning his childhood chum Mathieu's death at the hands of the National Convention, which judicially murdered a lot of people belonging to an out-of-power political faction. Aristide dreams of this beloved friend's death at the beginning of this book, and we see him relive the horrible ride to the guillotine that Mathieu took, though I'd think that the presence of a friend there, at that moment, would be a comfort to Mathieu...but the kicker is, as we find out in the course of this murder investigation, that Mathieu was actually In Love with Aristide, who until now was blissfully ignorant of this important fact of his friend's life.

**END SPOILER**

So what does Alleyn do with the major revelation that she gives to not one, but two, of the major characters in this book? Does she grandstand a little and make it a huge stonking Brie wheel of a deal? No. She incorporates the revelations into the actual plot, the real mystery to be solved. It's a very nice touch. It's a reason to keep reading in the series, since this isn't the first time she's done this. It's a marker of a careful, considerate writer, one respectful of her readers, and that kind of writer deserves our dollars.

So, in the end, does this book satisfy? Yes. Are there problems? Yeah...none big...a few scanted red herrings, a little bit of background not quite colored in, that's about all. But history, the living breathing thing history, can never fail to satisfy the discerning reader. Be one of Susanne Alleyn's discerning readers, you won't regret it.

GAME OF PATIENCE, third Aristide Ravel mystery

GAME OF PATIENCE (Aristide Ravel #3)
SUSANNE ALLEYN
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Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Paris, 1796. Aristide Ravel, freelance undercover police agent and investigator, is confronted with a double murder in a fashionable apartment. The victims prove to be Célie Montereau, the daughter of a wealthy and influential family, and the man who was blackmailing her.

Célie's enigmatic and bitter friend Rosalie Clément provides Aristide with intelligence that steers him toward Philippe Aubry, a young man with a violent past who had been in love with Célie. According to an eyewitness, however, Aubry could not have murdered Célie. As time passes, Aristide finds himself falling in love with Rosalie, albeit reluctantly, as he suspects that she knows more about the murders than she will say.

When Aristide uncovers evidence that points to Rosalie herself, he must learn whom she is protecting and why before he can obtain justice for Célie and save Rosalie from the guillotine. From the gritty back alleys of Paris to its glittering salons and cafés, through the heart of the feverish, decadent society of post-revolutionary France, Aristide's investigation leads him into a puzzle involving hidden secrets, crimes of passion, and long-nurtured hatreds.

With elaborate French cultural atmosphere, author Susanne Alleyn has created a sophisticated and stylish mystery set in the uneasy and turbulent years between the Terror and the rise of Napoleon.

My Review: French Revolution buff Alleyn's second novel and first mystery is a perfect example of how historical fiction can illuminate history in the most satisfying and intriguing light; simple textbook history doesn't and can't come close to the concerns and needs of the actual people of 1796 Paris, and this book does that job very, very well.

I could end this review here, adding only "read it yourself if you don't believe me," but I want to offer some specifics.

The upheaval of the Revolution was as inevitable as anything in all of history could be. When intolerable abuse is heaped upon enough people for a long enough time, they find a way to make it stop. While there were Royalists in France, like there were Tories in the American Revolution, they lost...so the history is that of the winners.

But what about the average citizen and citizeness? (These were the titles that replaced Monsieur et Madame in those years.) What did life hold for them? Alleyn explores this subject in her novel, and what life held was...well, what it always holds: Love, hate, fear, passion, joy, rejection, redemption (though that last is rare). So Alleyn delves into our human comedy to show us that, mutatis mutandis, Revolutionary Paris's people were just like us, only colder and hungrier.

The story of Aristide Ravel, police spy, and Henri Sanson, executioner, is one of destinies that criss-cross in unpleasant places. Surprisingly, they find themselves friends...okay, friendly acquaintances at first. As a result of the movements of the plot, their most dramatic meeting will cause the friendship to blossom or die; another book will tell that tale. But theirs is the central relationship in this book. It's an odd thing to say, I suppose, but it's true; they each have one half of a very important story in their possession, neither knowing this until the author clangs them into each other so hard that the reader's teeth rattle.

While Sanson is central to the story, he's offstage most of the time. This device worked well enough, though I was a bit overprepared for his eventual appearances by the time they happened.

The principal quality of this book for me was its rhythm. I felt I was there, living by the truly alien Revolutionary calendar of thirty-day months and ten-day weeks. I found myself thinking "isn't it just about décadi, shouldn't stuff be closed?" (That was the Revolutionary Sunday-day-of-rest equivalent.) I wondered where the manservant was more than once while immersed in Aristide's life...he's too poor to have one. (I relate.) I felt myself jolting along in the fiacre with Aristide and his boss (actually just the frost-heaved Long Island roads) to the Hotel de Ville (my village's city hall is nothing like so grand, but it's next to the liberry so the association stuck).

If you are bored by history, try reading this book. It will allow you to experience history more directly than even a conventional historical novel could, since there are such ordinary human stakes in the crime committed and its solution. If you're a mystery fan, the puzzle should keep you going. IIf you're just an old sourpuss, give it a miss. But I hope you aren't, and hope you'll have a great time walking around Paris with Aristide and his crew.

PALACE OF JUSTICE, second Aristide Ravel French Revolution mystery

PALACE OF JUSTICE (Aristide Ravel #2)
Susanne Alleyn
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Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: Louis XVI is in his grave, and Marie-Antoinette is on her way to trial. Paris is hungry, restless, and fearful in the autumn of 1793, and the guillotine’s blade is beginning to fall daily on the necks of enemies of the French Republic. Not even members of the Republican government are safe from the threat of the Revolutionary Tribunal, where the only sentence for the guilty is death.

In this atmosphere of distrust and anxiety, police agent Ravel, while coming to terms with personal tragedy, must stop a ruthless killer who is terrorizing the city. Ravel soon learns, however, that hunting a murderer who strikes at random and leaves headless corpses on the streets, paralleling the ever more numerous victims of the guillotine, is a task that will lead him to dark, painful secrets and echoes from an even darker past.

From the author of The Cavalier of the Apocalypse, A Treasury of Regrets, and Game of Patience comes the fourth Aristide Ravel mystery, unfolding amid the bloody events and murderous politics of the Reign of Terror.

My Review: Paris during the Terror, 1793, would seem to be a demi-Paradise for a homicide detective. There was a murder or six every few hours at the guillotine. But Aristide Ravel, whose first adventure The Cavalier of the Apocalypse is set in Royalist times and explains why he stopped trying to be a struggling writer and turned to crime (solving!) for his daily bread, is called upon to find the person beheading Paris's lesser folk in icky, non-guillotine-y ways. He does this while watching his dearly beloved friend Mathieu the National Assemblyman walk ever closer to a more judicial murder as a Brissotin. (They lost the power struggle with Robespierre and his ilk.) Ravel finds the suspect, proves he's involved in the grisly freelance murder spree that takes eighteen lives, the murderer confesses, and...and...

There is, quite simply, no excuse for anyone who likes historical novels not to read the Aristide Ravel books. Susanne Alleyn can and will transport you in 21st-century comfort to the fearful, hungry, exciting world of Revolutionary Paris, and you will be deeply glad that it's a book and not a time machine she's using. Though there are many times I would have sworn I really was there, I was so swept up in the action.

Alleyn is unjustly underknown. Please find her books, buy her books, and support the career of a storyteller who has the wit, the sparkle, and the smarts to bring a quietly ignored epoch to gritty, grisly, fascinating life for our amusement and (if we're willing to go there) edification. Highly, highly recommended.

THE CAVALIER OF THE APOCALYPSE, first Aristide Ravel historical mystery

THE CAVALIER OF THE APOCALYPSE (Aristide Ravel #1)
Susanne Alleyn
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Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In the cold winter of 1786, the streets of Paris are bubbling with discontent, warning of the Revolution to come. When a murdered man is found in a Parisian cemetery, struggling writer Aristide Ravel recognizes the strange symbols surrounding the body to be Masonic.

What secrets are lurking in the city of Paris? In this stunning historical mystery from Susanne Alleyn, Ravel will seek answers in Paris’ intellectual demimonde and discover a world of conspiracy, secret societies and scandal. The third Aristide Ravel mystery, a prequel set in the raucous years leading up to the French Revolution, The Cavalier of the Apocalypse is a fascinating look at a world in turmoil--steeped in atmosphere and peril.

My Review: Wow. In the third published, but first in reading order, of her Aristide Ravel, police spy, mysteries set in Revolutionary Paris, Alleyn actually takes us to 1786, ten years before the first published book (Game of Patience) is set. It is the dying spasm of the ancien regime, the time when the royal government's incompetence and the royal family's political tin ear reached the simultaneous peak of their rise to intolerability. The plot revolves around Aristide's informal induction into the ranks of police informers, and the character Brasseur becomes his mentor in the force.

There is much to like about this book. I am on record elsewhere as admiring Alleyn's ability to set a scene, establish a character, and make a plot revolve like an orrery. This book displays all those characteristics, so...so...why is it I feel just that little bit dissatisfied at the end of it?

Because it's a prequel. Since one of the main reasons I like mysteries is that they're orderly, I like them to appear in order so that I may read them in order. It's the way I want the world to work, this following that which is followed by the other thing. I understand that, sometimes, books in a series appear out of order because publishers make this decision. I don't know if that's the case here, but I gather not since Miss Alleyn is currently writing the fourth book in the series and it's set in 1793.

But really that's a minor point, only of interest to me and my fellow order freaks. The book itself has all the pleasures I've come to associate with Alleyn's writing and I recommend it heartily. Fellow order nuts, read it first!! FIRST!!

Book-A-Day #14: Favorite roman de France, A FAR BETTER REST

A FAR BETTER REST
SUSANNE ALLEYN
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Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A Tale of Two Cities is the story of Charles Darnay and Lucie Manette, but Sydney Carton is the hero who makes the ultimate sacrifice for love. Sydney disappears from the novel in London and turns up years later in Paris to bring the story to its heartbreaking end. A Far Better Rest imagines his missing personal history and makes him the center of this tragic tale. Born in England of an unloving father and a French mother, Sydney is sent to college in Paris, where he meets Charles Darnay and the other students who will have enormous influence on his life and alter the course of French history -- Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins among them. The beauty and kindness of Charles's wife, Lucie Manette, affects Sydney so deeply that he secretly devotes his life to her happiness.

Sydney becomes a major participant in the formation of the French Republic at the end of the eighteenth century and a witness to one of the most gruesome periods in history, as the significant people in his life fall to the guillotine. A Far Better Rest is a novel of passion, identity, and history that stands fully on its own.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt, in honor of Bastille Day, is to select your favorite novel set in or about France.

Okay. I know this will come as a surprise to y'all, being as how I've kept it such a closely guarded secret, but I have to say this right up front: I don't much care for the novels of Mr. Charles Dickens.

I know, I know, pick your jaws up from the floor, I'm sure you'll recover from the shock soon.

Now, with that bombshell out of the way, consider this: I am rating a book based on Mr. Dickens' dreary, interminable, turgid, jelly-bodied clunking clanking gawdawful sentimental absurdly overblown....

*ahem*

I am rating this novel, even factoring in its source, at four stars. And wanna know a secret? I've read all Alley's Aristide Ravel mysteries, set in Revolutionary Paris. And her novel The Executioner's Heir. And her short fiction, Masquerade. And her non-fiction Medieval UNderpants (I mean, how could one not read something titled Medieval Underpants?).

So absorb for a moment the improbability of a man with the discernment and good taste to loathe Dickens picking up this novel in the first place; reading a snatch of it and getting hooked; buying the Soho Press hardcover at retail; and becoming such a fan that he's read what there is to read by the author.

So I'd say that makes this my favorite novel set in and or about France. Why? Because I've read a lot of books, and unlike most historical fiction, this book reads like it was written by a person from that time who simply, inexplicably, happens to be alive now. The same is true of her Ravel mysteries. I don't know how she does it, exactly, but Alleyn handwaves away the 225 years between the Revolution and today. Forget you're reading a hardcover that did not cost you a month's wages. Or a Kindle whose mere existence would be a marvel to the people you're reading about. And you know what? You *will* forget those things.

I love immersive reads. I love to lose myself in a time and a place not here and not now. And Susanne Alleyn has done that for me again, and again, and never failed to make me happy I've spent time in her company.

Best of all? The Kindle edition of this book is a whopping $2.99. Please go buy it. This author deserves our support!