Fabulous Fiction Firsts #572

Mon, 12/28/2015 - 9:53pm by muffy

Readers mourning the untimely death of Ariana Franklin, the creator of the 12th-century medical examiner /catalog/search/keyword/Adelia%20Aguilar">Adelia Aguilar series should be pleased with a new series by Andrea Japp called The Lady Agnes Mystery (translated from the French by Lorenza Garcia).

One of the grandes dames of French crime writing and a forensic scientist by profession, Japp sets this series in early 14th century Normandy when the King of France and the Catholic Church were locked in a battle for power, amidst the medieval Inquisition.

Agnès Philippine Claire, illegitimate daughter of Robert, Baron de Larnay, was married off at thirteen to one of her father's cronies and widowed by sixteen. As Dame de Souarcy, running the estate falls on her shoulder when clothing and feeding her household is a constant struggle. She also has to contend with her lustful half-brother Eudes, who has turned his lecherous advances on her 11-year-old daughter, Mathilde. Meanwhile, in the countryside someone is killing friars and slashing their faces postmortem, possibly in an attempt to make their deaths seem the work of a wild animal in “The Season of the Beast,”, the first of four stories that showcase the courage and cunning needed for Agnes to survive in a time when women had few choices in life other than being “born to wealth, married, nuns, or prostitutes."

Read-alikes for Maurice Druon's The Iron King; C.J. Sansom's /catalog/search/subject/%22Shardlake%2C%20Matthew%20%28Fictitious%20character%29%22">Matthew Shardlake series; and Jean-François Parot's Nicolas Le Floch investigations.