Death of Kings / Bernard Cornwell

This is the sixth novel in the Saxon Tales series, and I’ve read them all. I suppose the danger with writing a series of historical novels pegged to real historical events is that not every volume can have a significant tide-turning, earth-shaking battle. After all, Napoleon just had the one Waterloo. Sometimes there is détente, an uneasy peace reigns for whatever reason, and great warriors like Uhtred of Bebbanburg sit around waiting for war to be called once again so they can do what they do best. These quiet times are just not very interesting to read about.

In Death of Kings Alfred the Great dies and his passing leads to a struggle for succession. The Danes are still a force to be reckoned with, but there are those Kentish men as well who aren’t necessarily keen on a single royal head of a unified England. There is a lot of hemming and hawing and riding back and forth on horseback, and a little distracting story about “angels” foretelling the future. Things don’t really start to move until the last fifty or so pages, and it is with some relief that the story ends and Uhtred lives to fight another day. I really hope that he can recapture his ancestral home of Bebbanburg, which has been his life’s ambition. Maybe in the next book? I hope it’s soon.

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The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

Transient Desires / Donna Leon

Book 30 of the Guido Brunetti mystery series. I haven’t read them all, but enough to enjoy a visit back with a familiar character in a setting I love. Two female American college students are left wounded and unconscious outside the hospital emergency room in the middle of the night. Brunetti soon discovers who left them there, but the question remains why? The plot involves a nephew indebted to his criminal and abusive uncle, and illegal human trafficking. The book ends rather abruptly, and you may get the sense that after twenty-nine installments of the series, the author might just be phoning it in. Nevertheless, this book represented a nice little trip back to a Venice where real people live and work, and this to me is never a waste of time. I downloaded this to my iPad.

Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

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