TEST
Uneasy Lies the Crown is the thirteenth book in Tasha Alexander’s series of historical mysteries featuring Lady Emily Hargreaves and her husband, the dashing Lord Colin, agent of the crown. I knew this before going in and decided to give it a go anyway, so it’s entirely possible that fans who have read each preceding instalment may not have the same issues with it that I did. With that said, however, it’s unlikely that, had I read any of the others, I would have been able to forgive the stodgy and poorly executed sub-plot which drags down the story as a whole.
On her deathbed, Queen Victoria most improbably passes a secret missive to Lord Colin Hargeaves, instructing him to execute her final wishes. Colin and his beloved wife and partner in sleuthing, Lady Emily, are determined to puzzle out the mysterious message sent to them by the Queen. But on the day of Victoria’s funeral a man is found run through with a sword in the Tower of London, dressed in clothes identical to those worn by King Henry VI in a portrait, and propped up with fishing wire and wooden slats to keep him in a standing position. That murder is just the first of the medieval-inspired crimes our sleuths must try to solve.
Emily desperately wants to be involved in the investigation, but naturally the men in charge refuse to allow her a foothold. So through the back door – and with her husband’s help – she sneaks into brothels and supper clubs, in an attempt to try to figure out the mystery. When the coroner rules that the victim – an upstanding and mild-mannered greengrocer named Mister Gummidge – drowned before he was struck by arrows, Emily’s gears begin grinding – even more so when a second victim dies in the ghastly manner meted out to King Edward II. More people die in the gruesome ways medieval kings met their makers, dressed up in relevant costumes – and Emily tries to tie the crimes together through a dead prostitute and a widow, a mining accident and a revenge plot. All the while, Collin continues to receive letters threatening the life of the new king and must try to protect Bertie (as Edward VII was known to his friends) while figuring out if the murders and deaths threats are connected.
In a parallel story, we flash back to the lives of the pious William and Cecily Hargeaves in the 1400s, ancestors of Colin’s who must deal with royal conspiracies of their own. While William is wounded off fighting with Henry IV during a long, slogging campaign into France, Cecily becomes embroiled, along with her childhood friend, Adeline, in intrigues of infidelity on the home front. Both William and Cecily must cling to their faith if they wish to survive and see one another again.
My feelings about Uneasy Lies The Crown are mixed. The mystery is decently absorbing and twisty and I really loved Emily’s narrator voice; she was charming and romantic and wonderfully bloody-minded. More formal Colin and their adventurous son, Henry, all popped to life as interesting characters. Two smart cookies solving a mystery together will always intrigue me and keep me reading, and their continuing love story is beautifully put together.
But the secondary storyline is where the novel derails. The William and Cecily portions of the novel feel oddly tacked on and have little relevance, beyond their connection to Colin, to the main plot. There’s a lack of definitive split between William and Cecily’s points of narration that feels inelegant and rather awkward. The simple pat morality of those chapters aren’t very challenging, and those featuring Cecily are extremely repetitive, and she is so pious and muted, and spends so much time shying away from conflict and praying, that she seems barely a character but more of a plot construct. It happens multiple times before the plotline finally moves along and manages to get anywhere interesting.
Uneasy Lies the Crown is a fairly decent mystery with a great heroine, but it is dragged down by its subplot and can’t, ultimately, even be described as an average quality read.
Buy it at: Amazon/Apple Books/Barnes & Noble/Kobo
Grade: D
Book Type: Historical Mystery
Sensuality: Kisses
Review Date: 02/11/18
Publication Date: 10/2018
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.
Lisa Fernandes is a writer, reviewer and recapper who lives somewhere on the East Coast. Formerly employed by Firefox.org and Next Projection, she also currently contributes to Women Write About Comics. Read her blog at http://thatbouviergirl.blogspot.com/, follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thatbouviergirl or contribute to her Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/MissyvsEvilDead or her Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com/missmelbouvier
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I didn’t care for the series which I stated in my first comment. My point oceanjasper is that I feel it was unfair to review the 13th book when the reviewer hadn’t read any other books in the series. Don’t appreciate your snark.
@Caz: I agree with you!
@Sandy: I didn’t care for Ashley’s Kat Holloway.
I didn’t much like the Kat Holloway books, either.
As regards series, all of us here do sometimes pick up books that are part of long-running series in which we haven’t read earlier books – and we make that clear – so that we can tell anyone thinking about reading it if it works as a stand alone or not. Lisa does state very clearly that there are things about the story that would have been problematic even if she HAD read more of the series.
I reviewed a book last year that was book 11 in a series I hadn’t read before that was truly terrible (a D-). Having read the other books wouldn’t have altered my opinion; bad writing and characterisation were bad writing and characterisation.
All that said, I’m sure there are fans of this series who will love it and wonder if Lisa read the same book they did. *shrug*
Good point!
I agree with Caz Owen. I gave up on the Lady Emily series several books ago. I love C.S. Harris and Sherry Thomas. Also give Jennifer Ashley’s mystery series a try.
Well then, here’s an opinion on the first book in the series. I got about a quarter of the way through before turning to something else. It wasn’t terrible but the writing felt kind of plodding and uninspired. Even the prospect of the romance which had been its selling point for me couldn’t make me keep going (I had picked it up for free, which made it an easy decision). But there may have been improvement in later books…?
Historical mysteries are so common these days that unless a writer has a good grasp of their time period, an entertaining style and can actually craft a good mystery, there’s always another series to try.
I listened to the first book which was narrated by the superb Kate Reading – I suspect my grade (a B-) would have been lower had I read it. It wasn’t bad but I wasn’t engaged enough to want to read or listen to any more in the series. So there’s that.
And quite honestly, Sherry Thomas and C.S Harris have pretty much ruined me for any other historical mysteries anyway!
The interesting thing is that I’d definitely try this series again, if only to figure out if it gets better minus William and Cecily.
I’m not a fan of Lady Emily, but I don’t think it’s fair to grade the thirteenth book so low when you haven’t read any of the previous books in the series. It doesn’t reflect well on AAR in my humble opinion.
That’s honestly not why I graded it so low. I didn’t feel like I was coming into the middle of something confusing (I grasped everything quite easily, actually; I’m careful to denote if I’m jumping into a long series – if I had felt confused I woulda said so). I graded it low because of the subplot was so preachy and simplistic, and such a huge distraction from the main part of the novel.
If it’d just been about Colin and Emily, I would’ve graded it around a C+/B-, with points off for dragging a bit in the middle. With William and Cecily’s morality play, it went way lower because it was such an obvious, dull slog of a plot.
Caz is right about us doing longer series and jumping in; usually any good long series can catch a new reader up and make them feel welcome no matter when they pop into it (I’m thinking of stuff like the Bridgertons, for instance!).
* If I’m jumping into a long series and it’s not for new readers.
I’ve also given As and Bs to long series that won’t work for new readers as well!
* But those are special cases – they have to be very compelling and some books have been!
I yearn for an edit button. My kingdom for an edit button!