|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
Eleventh in C. S. Harris's historical mystery series featuring the dashing and titled Sebastian St. Cyr, WHEN FALCONS FALL finds the protagonist and his stunning wife Hero in the tiny village of Ayleswick-on-Teme, England with their infant son Silas. They have traveled here so that Sebastian can deliver a gift to the grandmother of a recently deceased friend of his. However, before they can settle into their rooms at the local inn, the body of a young woman is discovered lying in a field by the river, an evident suicide. The mysteries about her and her death mount quickly: her name may not be Mrs Emma Chance, her death looks staged to the local lawman (young and inexperienced but bright), and there do not seem to be any clues at all to who might have wanted her dead if indeed this is a murder. The lawman knows Sebastian by reputation and asks for help.
Sebastian has hidden things about himself just as the young woman seems to have done, for he is on a long and agonizingly slow search to find out who he might really be – definitely not the son of the good man who raised him and left him his estate but the result of one of his mother's many affairs. We quickly learn that Emma Chance was on a similar quest; raised as a bastard at a boarding school where she was lavishly paid for but never befriended or given her identity, she has gathered clues that have led her to this same little village with a list of local men who might possibly have fathered her.
A variety of locals mention in passing that there were similar deaths twenty to twenty five years back, young women who were judged to be suicides because of the odd circumstances of their deaths and the fact that each of them, unmarried and young, was suspected to be pregnant. Not one but several men who live in the village area have been known to prey on beautiful young women so the list of suspects Sebastian works up is long and complicated.
The number of rapes, suicides, murders, and secrets that Sebastian finds a way to resolve is staggering and points to one of the problems with this novel. It is simply over the top, too much for one book. That he can figure out which are suicides and which are murders after such a long time has passed, find a way to connect them to Emma Chance's death, and point to those guilty in the present and those who must have been in the past (some are dead now themselves) is an awful lot to ask the reader to swallow.
Even more difficult for me is the fact that this novel refuses to stand alone. I have not read the first ten novels but I was constantly forced to believe that I should have if I was going to judge the quality of this one. Too much of what has happened along the way is not supplied as back story, which resulted in leading me in a direction that Harris never intended: how is it that Sebastian St. Cyr can be so clever and skilled in discovering the true identity of a stranger and what has befallen her and a number of others and be so unsuccessful in discovering his own parentage? Yikes! He's already had eleven novels to work it out in and he's still suffering from so much angst about who he "really" is that he can't enjoy the massive properties and fortune he's inherited, bask in the love of his lovely wife and child, and get on with his life.
§ Diana Borse is retired from teaching English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and savoring the chance to read as much as she always wanted to.
Reviewed by Diana Borse, April 2016
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
| 
