Smokin’ Seventeen by Janet Evanovich

Seventeen books in to her bestselling series, Janet Evanovich has her high-voltage, man-juggling bounty hunter Stephanie Plum right where she wants her. With pneumatic partner Lula always close at hand to provide comic relief and practical back-up, Stephanie enters Smokin’ Seventeen with a romantic dilemma and, possibly, under a curse.

As in previous outings, she continues to juggle an open relationship with a local cop, Joe Morelli, with regular trysts with a security expert, Ranger. Indisputably, she neither needs nor is seeking further personal entanglements – but her family puts paid to that by ushering in one Dave Brewer, the son of a family friend who has returned to the Plum stomping ground, blue-collar Trenton, New Jersey, following a messy legal entanglement and subsequent business and marital failures.

Shortly before the predictably awkward set-up, Stephanie is bailed up at a doughnut shop by Morelli’s fearsome grandmother, Bella, who gives her ‘the eye’ and curses her with unspecified maladies.

At the same time, a body is discovered on the property of Vincent Plum Bail Bonds, where Stephanie works for her cousin. In all, five bodies are found, and Trenton authorities are on the trail of a serial killer. It speaks to the rich vein of mirth in Evanovich’s storytelling that the killings and the apparent effects of the curse carry equal portions of the plot.

The curse, it transpires, may relate to Stephanie’s libido, and certainly relates to a memorable scene involving a Porsche 911 and a blind alley in the bad part of town. The serial killer, for his part, will be lucky indeed to elude the snare of Stephanie and luscious Lula, who advocates regular fried-chicken breaks and takes imaginative umbrage at being called ‘fat’ (news of an upcoming Stephanie Plum movie, with Katherine Heigl in the starring role, is heartening chiefly for the prospect of Lula being brought to celluloid life).

It’s fitting that Smokin’ Seventeen reads like a high-camp action movie. When Lula tires of the histrionics exhibited by one of the pair’s ‘FTAs’ (for failure to appear, the people they make a living from tracking down and returning to custody), she merely pulls her stun-gun out of her purse and zaps him. He’s not a threat – he believes himself to be a vampire, and Stephanie and Lula have tracked him down at the local funeral home, where he spends his days in a casket.

Later, Stephanie refutes the unwanted advances of an admirer by belting him in the side of the head with her hairdryer and leaving him outside her apartment to take his leave once he has come to. She also pulls the stun-gun trick on a less-than-kindly stranger who elbows her in a queue. Never are Stephanie and Lula subjected to legal chastisement or read the civil rights riot act. That would just spoil the fun.

It’s light fiction, no question, but Evanovich has a rare talent for comic writing, and readers rightly keep returning to her tightly bordered world in which the usual rules don’t apply. While Sizzling Sixteen seemed to suffer from a lack of inspiration – Stephanie went through her paces, but appeared plagued by a vague malaise – Smokin’ Seventeen has her back on form.

3 / 5 stars: Evanovich doesn’t falter for a moment in Stephanie Plum’s most audaciously camp outing yet.

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Fallen by Karin Slaughter

Karin Slaughter likes a strong woman. Take one of her recurring characters, Special Agent Faith Mitchell, for whom she has created quite a backstory. Pregnant at 14, Faith mustered the fortitude to give birth to her son, complete high school, and later train to serve in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, where she eventually met her professional partner, Will Trent.

Not content with this degree of multitasking, by the time Slaughter opens her new novel, Fallen, she has given Faith a four-month-old daughter, who is cared for by her grandmother, retired Atlanta police chief Evelyn Mitchell, while Faith works.

Slaughter, true to form, makes the opening passages of her nearly 400-page tome count. Arriving home later than expected because of a meeting overrun, Faith exits her car to see a trail of blood leading to the front door, her infant daughter locked in the shed, and her mother’s gun missing from the shed safe. Minutes later, her home is filled with the bodies of local gang members and drug mules.

Evelyn, whose blood is at the scene, is nowhere to be found, and thanks to a curtain-twitching neighbour, questions emerge about what the ex-cop was really up to of a morning. Why was she leaving the house for hours each day with an Hispanic man with gang connections? And does it have anything to do with the corruption scandal that tainted members of her squad and forced her departure?

Fallen is less of a whodunit than a who-are-they. Regular Slaughter cast members Will Trent and Dr Sara Linton enter the fray to conduct the investigation, establish the identities of the dead men and help locate Evelyn, whose whereabouts are hinted at in brief, grisly scenes. Just as importantly for long-time readers, the pair continue their fraught but unconsummated liaison, complicated by Will’s unstable estranged wife and the ghost of Sara’s late husband, who was a prominent presence in earlier novels.

Slaughter has painstakingly developed the personalities of Faith, Sara, Will and others over 10 years’ worth of books, in her series set in the fictional Georgia region of Grant County. In an enlightening postscript to Fallen, she sheds some light on her reasoning for moving her characters to the big smoke of Atlanta: among them, that the rising number of grisly deaths in Grant County would beg the question of why anyone would continue to live there, and that the blank canvas of a large city was too rich for a writer to ignore.

Fallen isn’t her best work – despite her evident care, the plot feels flimsy and the pay-off, though plausible, is almost cynical. She is a writer of substance with a clear, fluid style, and it seems that with this outing, she has chosen to devote more energy to character growth than to the atypically pedestrian storyline. In particular, close calls for both Sara and Will appeared less important for plot purposes than for forcing each to confront their feelings.

Slaughter patently adores her characters, and takes some pride in planning their trajectories several novels ahead, leaving hints for readers as to what may come. The fictive potential of the city of Atlanta will be a test of this writer’s considerable skills.

3 / 5 stars: With character arcs to burn, this is one for the fans.

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The Girl in the Polka-dot Dress by Beryl Bainbridge

John Fury, a horse-farming, spiritually awakened Los Angeles lawyer.

Monsignor Secker, conducting Mass for the American casualties of Vietnam in a small town near the Great Lakes.

The two are among the large, well-drawn supporting cast of a beguilingly demented road trip that is the subject of Beryl Bainbridge’s final novel, The Girl in the Polka-dot Dress.

Rose and Harold are at the centre of the maelstrom. Rose arrives on the east coast of the United States on a one-way ticket from her grim home in Kentish Town, while Harold, an oddball bachelor, commandeers the rattletrap van in which they strike out for the west.

The two are introduced by a mutual acquaintance and at first, trying to work out precisely who they are is like peering through a dusty window – only the vaguest outlines can be discerned. Rose is young, pretty and damaged; Harold is older, and queer in the old-fashioned sense. He might be a sex pest, or merely lacking social skills (a little of both, it turns out).

Their madcap, disorienting cross-country journey is intended to ferret out one Dr Wheeler, which whom each has an unspecific yet powerful connection. Along the way they stop where they might chance to find him, colliding with the novel’s other peculiar inhabitants and discovering repeatedly that he checked out a few days ago, two weeks before.

It is hard to believe Wheeler really exists, or that either of the increasingly redoubtable protagonists is the most absorbent towel on the roll – but the sheer beauty of Bainbridge’s prose is addictive, her ability to conjure whole people calling to mind the descriptive power of F Scott Fitzgerald.

Of Harold’s first encounter with the mysterious Dr Wheeler, at a reception to mark Robert Kennedy’s appointment as Attorney General, she writes:

“When [Wheeler] crossed a room he glided rather than walked, head slightly inclined. Sometimes, when speaking, he shielded his eyes with his hand, the way people did when gazing into the distance. It wasn’t altogether contrived, simply that he was one of those fortunate people who made an impression.”

The adventure spans much of the extraordinary period in 1968 between the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King in early April and that of Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy in June. Both men cast long shadows: one character describes his witnessing of King’s killing, while Kennedy’s movements on the campaign trail, mentioned in passing, grow more poignant as the duo journeys toward the fated Ambassador Hotel.

The plot thickens, then elongates, and as California looms the reader wonders whether the pay-off will be forthcoming or if, as they say, the journey is the destination. Then they hit the coast and all becomes clear. It’s quite surprising that it does, because when Bainbridge died last July the novel was not yet complete. Her long-time friend and editor Brendan King prepared the text for publication from her working manuscript, taking into account suggestions Bainbridge made at the end of her life and adding no extra material.

It is a worthy capping to an extraordinary career.

4 / 5 stars: Beryl Bainbridge’s final novel is a subtle masterwork.

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Summer of Love by Katie Fforde

The slipping-into-a-warm-bath experience proffered by Katie Fforde has stood the Gloucestershire writer in very good stead over the course of what, with Summer of Love, is now a 17-novel catalogue.

The lightness and gentle humour of her writing apparently reflect authorial traits: the jacket bio (always revelatory as to how seriously a writer takes herself) reveals that recently, Fforde’s “old hobbies of ironing and housework have given way to singing, flamenco dancing and husky racing. She claims this keeps her fit.” Similarly, there are traces of self-deprecation in some of her characters.

In Summer of Love, Sian Bishop is a single mother who arrives with four-year-old son Rory in a small town in the countryside not far from London. Rory was the result of the briefest of affairs, and has never met his father, who doesn’t know of his existence. Although Sian could track him down, they agreed when he departed for a long stint overseas that it was best to cut all ties, and Sian – whose rare brand of insecure doggedness becomes extremely grating as the story develops – has been true to their accord, raising Rory with the help of her parents.

It is when the pair decamp from London in search of a civilized school that the tale commences and Fforde’s lively, vibrant cast of characters begins to troop in to Sian’s rented cottage. All boxes are ticked: mid-50s Fiona is sage, fearless and seeking love on the internet; prickly, poised Melissa wants to buy the cottage out from under Sian and Rory, and periodically pops in to ponder her future renovation of the “damp, poky” kitchen; James the bookseller is a dark horse with sound romantic potential; and then there’s Gus, Fiona’s son, who hoves cursingly into view in the midst of a dinner party . . .

To say much more would be to give away a game which gets suspenseful (in a soft, relaxing sort of way) about a third of the way in. The quiet, orderly life Sian has created for herself and her son is wrenched wide open, and skeletons emerge, but no one gets hurt and there are plenty of breaks for tea and scones.

Fforde’s books are very much for women, and loathe as I am to use the term ‘chick-lit’, with writers such as the tremendous Jennifer Weiner having disparaged it, I don’t know of a more apt descriptor for her ability to spin amusing yarns that tie up neatly at the end. Her characters have all the flaws, foibles and blind spots of people you know, but the tidy conclusions bear little resemblance to real life, which is where her books find their appeal.

Summer of Love doesn’t push any boundaries, and readers will struggle even to register the existence of some characters; Rory, for instance, is merely a cipher, existing only to serve a larger purpose in the plot. It is neither intellectually challenging nor very memorable, but will provide comfort and distraction to those of a certain bent. Much like a warm bath.

2.5 / 5 stars: Ideal for a winter escape.

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Madeleine by Kate McCann

The McCann family once was ordinary. Kate and Gerry, a Liverpudlian GP and Scottish cardiologist respectively, had a thriving young family and promising careers which had taken them far and wide – from New Zealand, where their relationship evolved from friendship to romance, to Amsterdam, where Gerry advanced his training for a year while Kate cared for their yearned-for firstborn child.

The only blight on their married life had been infertility, which they conquered through the use of IVF. Three healthy children were born: Madeleine, and 20 months later, the twins Sean and Amelie.

It was in May 2007 that the McCanns were whisked from anonymity to international fame and notoriety, when Madeleine was taken from her bed as her parents and their friends ate dinner at a tapas restaurant within the Portuguese resort at which they were holidaying.

Madeleine is Kate McCann’s account of what happened that night, what led up to it (canvassed in brief preliminary chapters covering her early life and marriage to Gerry) and, exhaustively, the period since she last saw her daughter, with particular focus on 2007 and what she calls the “worst year”, 2008, when she and Gerry were named arguido (suspects) by the Portuguese police – who, few readers will not conclude, were woefully inept at best and corrupt at worst.

She recounts the days at the resort before the abduction, and how the group of friends they were with, all of whom had young children, took turns checking on their sleeping offspring during uneventful dinners in the preceding evenings. She remembers comments from Madeleine and other apparently innocuous details that in hindsight may indicate that someone was watching the family and might have entered the children’s room before the night she was taken.

She addresses the criticisms of police and the public; that the McCanns neglected their children by leaving them alone, and that they know more about what happened to their daughter than they have let on. Reading Madeleine, it is impossible to merit any of these misgivings.

As Kate McCann explains, she was not without qualms in telling the story for the first time from her family’s perspective. In particular, she feared that it would unduly expose the twins. In the end, she says, she hopes the book will help prove to her younger children that their parents did everything possible to find their sister, and indeed, the fourth-anniversary timing of publication is designed to trigger another round of publicity and raises funds for the continuing search.

Even for a non-parent, Madeleine makes for inordinately painful reading (and those with children should be warned). It is troubling not only for its well-known horror, but for the clarity with which McCann describes events and their effects on her family, thanks in part to the detailed diary she began keeping shortly after the abduction on the suggestion of a former intelligence officer.

(Later in the book, describing the leaking of the same diary to a tabloid, her words have the air of a resigned shrug: as indignities and betrayals go, it is far from the worst she has received from authority figures.)

Madeleine is a powerful portrait of grief, loss and hope, and a story that leaves you hoping for something greater than the subject’s safe return: that every child should have parents like hers.

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Daughters of Rome by Kate Quinn

The Year of the Four Emperors was one of the most messily eventful in a Roman regime that never had qualms about the gratuitous shedding of blood (but then, who ever heard of a squeamish empire?).

Such historical drama cries out for creative representation, and the latest comes in the form of Daughters of Rome, a prequel to California native Kate Quinn’s first novel Mistress of Rome. Where that tale was set during the 15-year reign of Domitian (who when he appears late in Daughters of Rome is depicted as favouring a Caligulan style of personal relations), this addresses the blood-soaked instability of June 68AD to December 69AD, when first Galba then Otho, Vitellius and finally Vespasian seized the title of Caesar.

And seize they did. In Quinn’s Rome, assuming the precarious position of emperor is the outcome not of merit but of skill in the game of daggers at dawn. It is hard to avoid pondering the parallels with modern-day corporate warfare – the likes of Michael Eisner would probably find a lot more to identify with in the character of Piso than he would care to admit.

Piso is the beloved, kindly and ambitious husband of the eldest of the titular ‘daughters’, 24-year-old Cordelia Prima. Her younger sister, the self-pitying schemer Cordelia Secunda, goes by the nickname Marcella. Cousins to the elder women are Cordelias Three and Four, known as Lollia and Diana.

Lollia’s superficial flightiness disguises a core of steel common to all the women, each of whom is one marriage or stab-wound away from the seat of the empress. At 19, Lollia is on her fourth marriage and prefers the company of her slave Thrax to that of her husband, while Diana, though sought by every well-bred man in the empire, prefers males of the equine variety.

It is the relationships between the four women, and how the ambitions and cares of each prompt them to act for and against one another, that form a fictional parallel to some of the most unpredictable months in human history. And in a useful footnote, Quinn explains which of her characters actually existed, which historical events are real to history, and where dates were conflated or fudged for dramatic effect.

(Rather sweetly, she so admired the bravery and loyalty of one historical figure that she erases his death on the night of an emperor’s assassination and instead sets him up in a happy relationship with one of the Cordelii.)

Quinn’s writing is vivid and fanciful, and invites comparison with the sober, considered historical fiction of Philippa Gregory. While unlike the latter’s protagonists Quinn’s female characters are mostly inventions, she has the potential to make key events in the Roman empire as lively and accessible for women readers as Gregory has Tudor history.

Indeed, much of what transpires in Daughters of Rome is eerily familiar. The bloodbath that ends the seven-month reign of the first of the four emperors is reminiscent of the famous multi-family assassination scene in another Italian drama, The Godfather Part I – frenzied wailing and gnashing, the glint of metal, blood and corpses. Perhaps there is nothing new under the Roman sun.

2.5 / 5 stars: In this Rome, the women are the warriors.

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The Conductor by Sarah Quigley

The themes of her latest work suggest that New Zealand author Sarah Quigley has been communing with the artistic and historical ghosts of Berlin, her home for the past decade.

The Conductor is extraordinarily ambitious, and for the most part it succeeds. Its conceit is the survival, and importance, of artistic pursuits under extreme duress – how the human urge to make and create can triumph over the dark desire to dominate and destroy.

Quigley has chosen as her setting not the German capital but Leningrad, in the grim months of 1941 and early 1942, as the Third Reich conducted the fateful Operation Barbarossa to conquer Russia.

Her people – who grow smaller both literally and figuratively, as the enemy approaches and the siege of the city and the starvation of its citizens begins – are a small, endearing coterie of artists, some historical figures and some inventions.

She presents the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich as a mid-30s workaholic who obsesses over his symphonies at the expense of his young family. At this time, Shostakovich was writing his renowned Seventh Symphony (nicknamed Leningrad), and combining periods of compulsive creativity with rest breaks in which, by Quigley’s description, he would down vodka with his close friend Ivan Sollertinsky, a professor at the Leningrad Conservatory and the competitive, egoistic artistic director of the city’s Philharmonic Orchestra.

A more fleeting appearance is made by Yevgeny Mravinsky, who by the time the novel begins has cemented the Philharmonic’s reputation as one of Europe’s greatest. Quigley glosses over the flight from the falling Leningrad of Mravinsky and his principal orchestra, choosing instead to devote much of the narrative to the superhuman efforts of Karl Eliasberg, who was left behind with the ailing members of the reserve orchestra and conducted the premiere of Shostakovich’s symphony.

Another plotline is more personal, following the travails of Eliasberg’s lead violinist, a widower who believes his young daughter, a talented cellist, to have died on her way to a safe haven outside the city.

At times, the intensity with which Quigley evokes her characters’ inner lives is reminiscent of the visceral, portentous prose of Edgar Allan Poe: unable to sleep for fretting over his professional responsibilities and the destabilization of Europe, Shostakovich, “his mind stretched as tightly as rope”, hallucinates the sensation of a rat running across his face – “rasping claws, a dragging leathery slither, a foul breath mixing with his.”

Later, she neither shies away from nor glorifies the horror of the siege, as food supplies run out and survival becomes a matter of cunning and a willingness to consume what others will not. Nikolai’s suspiciously healthy-looking neighbours are revealed to be capturing and cooking rats, while human bodies in the street, once disinterred from the ever-present snow, are found to be missing their fleshiest parts. These have been removed and eaten by others.

While the nature of the completed symphony is not Quigley’s concern – it was celebrated at the time as an impassioned, defiant response to Nazi militarism – her homage to the beauty and power of art, and to the value of courage, is her own, deserved triumph.

3.5 / 5 stars: A New Zealander’s account of European artistry and war.

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Hanging Hill by Mo Hayder

Disclaimer: I adore Mo Hayder’s writing – her twisty but never implausible plotting, her gimlet-eyed view of her jaundiced casts – and can’t claim to approach her work with a lack of bias. She is particularly noted for grisly frankness, which even by crime thriller standards is unusually confronting (her second novel, 2001’s The Treatment, had themes of paedophilia and other child abuse), and perhaps it is this, combined with the lack of self-conscious or artifice in her writing or characters, which makes her so compelling.

Unlike 2010’s Gone, part of her Walking Man series featuring several recurring characters, her new work Hanging Hill is a stand-alone novel which centres on the murder of a pretty young high-schooler in the historic English city of Bath. The girl’s body is found shortly after her failure to return from a daytime shopping trip. She is discovered with a tennis ball wedged into her mouth; two messages are scrawled on her bare torso in bright lipstick. The motive for the killing is unclear.

While this crime drives the plot, the real story, set up in a cryptic prologue involving a conversation at a funeral, is about two adult sisters, Zoe and Sally. As the tale unfolds, it emerges that Zoe and Sally have been estranged since childhood, following an event so traumatic that the girls’ parents determined it would be best to separate them forever, starting with different boarding schools.

The separation stuck, though the two remain in Bath, averting their eyes when they see each other in the street and keeping abreast of each others’ lives through the chance comments of mutual acquaintances. Zoe knows of Sally’s recent divorce – though not that its cause was her husband’s affair with their blowsy Australian au pair, with whom he now has a new baby – and Sally tracks Zoe’s career with the Bath police.

Both women bear heavy emotional and practical burdens. Zoe copes with the pressures of her job and a tentative affair with a colleague by self-harming, while Sally’s lack of financial acumen has her hovering just above penury. Both women are led by their choices and circumstances towards one another and, more precipitously, in the direction of Bath’s dark underbelly and some miscreants who have fetched up there (including a delightfully repellent big-time pornographer who inadvertently becomes a vivid fulcrum of the narrative).

The investigation of the initial murder is what first snares the sisters and may bring them freedom. Zoe is part of the investigating team, and the dead girl was an acquaintance of Sally’s daughter Millie. The two teenagers had several friends in common, some of whom become suspects (in the loosest sense of the term – there is a dearth of vim and vigour in Hayder’s version of the Bath constabulary) thanks to some criminal profiling that is more convenient than accurate.

Hayder has a particular knack for character creation, and for even-handedness, drawing out the good as she does the bad. It is all too easy in crime writing to set up a couple of red-herring, paint-by-numbers villains, while artfully concealing the diabolical sociopathy of that nice, nondescript chap who’s been under the reader’s nose the whole time.

This writer never does so, instead constructing her story so craftily, with such sleight of hand, that the mysteries of the chapters seem to unfold for her just as they do her reader. She is indisputably one of the greats.

4 / 5 stars: Menacing and masterful.

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Taste of a Traveller by Brett McGregor

For a time-honoured way to navigate the globe from your armchair, nothing beats the humble cookbook. Whether delving deeply into the cuisine of a single nation, region or culture (a la Julia Child), or hopscotching from pillar to post in search of favourite delicacies and little-known specialties (Anthony Bourdain has ingeniously parlayed drug-fuelled stove slavery into lucrative culinary tourism), chefs can, as they say, take the reader on a journey.

 Brett McGregor, winner of the first season of New Zealand’s version of Masterchef (the second is screening currently), has produced Taste of a Traveller, a luscious, diverse and user-friendly collection of recipes based on his travels in southeast Asia, Spain and Morocco, and his homeland. The chapter on the latter begins with a recipe, ‘The old lady’s cheese scones’, that is sure to prompt a smile from any Kiwi with a hint of British lineage.

Other recipes in the New Zealand section range from the inventive to the comforting, with lashings of kai moana and many nods to the new New Zealand – tarakihi with mint, orange and macadamia salad, various fritter iterations, ‘Mrs Patel’s crayfish curry’, roast chicken and lamb, Middle Eastern-inspired spiced chicken wings – all characterized by the absence of fussiness or complexity.

Indeed, if you knew McGregor solely from the book, you’d gather that his cooking mantra is simplicity. Regarding of which dish or type of cuisine he is describing, no method given requires more than a dozen steps beyond the basic preparation of ingredients. (Ironically, this contrasts with last year’s Masterchef New Zealand The Cookbook: Volume One, where the high-end restaurant calibre of the dishes puts faithful reproduction of recipes beyond the inclination or capability, or both, of most home cooks.)

Though Asian food is a good example of straightforward cooking, devoting nuance and complexity to flavour rather than method of preparation, the chapter on Spain, in which McGregor writes of his fondness for the siesta and tapas bar, is perhaps the best example. He says his six-ingredient Catalan tomato bread now commonly features in his own breakfast, and presents a one-pot chicken and chickpea stew that looks like a rewarding result for strikingly little effort.

In Morocco we have the classics – harissa, chermoula, preserved lemon and chicken tagine, couscous, mint tea – and some fusion, with kumara falafel and lamb kebab prepared three ways.

There is little he doesn’t know about the food of Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia, and his love of Thai cuisine is such that he dedicates a spin-off chapter just to curries. Fortunately for those with more to learn, McGregor writes with just as much clarity as he cooks.

Taste of a Traveller is an ode to McGregor’s passion for food, travel, and his beloved wife and son, whose constant companionship is evident in the travel snaps dotting the pages. It’s substantial, recipe-heavy and devoid of filler: the gracious foreword is by food writer and Masterchef judge Ray McVinnie, and there are brief lists of basic staple ingredients at the beginning of each new chapter.

And if anyone were apt to be misled as to McGregor’s provenance by the multinational character of the compilation, they need turn only to the final chapter, ‘Sweets’, for redirection, and find, in the first two entries, recipes for chocolate fudge and ‘never-fail’ pavlova. Kiwi as.

3 / 5 stars: User-friendly gastronomy for travel lovers.

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The Red Queen by Philippa Gregory

Young girl (criminally so, if this weren’t the royal family) is married off to indifferent, wildly ambitious swordsman and widowed before delivering a son. Is remarried to a much nicer and more sedate man, but forced to relinquish custody of son and heir to late husband’s brother, for whom she feels inappropriate emotional stirrings. With departure from mortal coil of Husband #2 she makes a canny choice of third spouse, but comes to suspect she is being double-crossed in her endeavours to install her child on the British throne and fulfill her life purpose.

Such is the stuff of the early to mid-life story of Margaret Beaufort, protagonist of the stirring The Red Queen, the second installment in Gregory’s new series, The Cousins’ War, which focuses on the time of the Wars of the Roses. The first book in the series, last year’s The White Queen, depicted in the author’s usual vivid style the bloody machinations that characterized the tussling for the throne of England back when real power was at stake.

Where the first novel traced the story of Elizabeth Woodville, the widowed mother of two who became a loving and fecund wife to Edward IV and the mother of the ‘Princes in the Tower’ and Elizabeth of York, the second introduces the girl who will become her arch-rival and who in 1453 at age 12 is tasked with producing the heir to the throne and advancing the House of Lancaster over that of York.

It’s all rather confronting for a barely pubescent, pious child whose sole dream is to become an abbess and who fantasizes about emulating the deity-driven acts of valour of Joan of Arc.

However, Margaret proves to possess a stronger instinct for survival than her idol, and becomes one of the most remarkable women of her day. Gregory depicts her as near-obsessive in her drive to see her son, Henry, take England’s throne, and her own name written as Margaret Regina.

Gregory, an historian by trade, has been clear since her earliest forays into writing historical fiction of the Tudor period that her novels are the result of extensive research and literary sleight-of-hand. There are conversations, recollections and interior musings that, absent the detailed diaries of all concerned, cannot be verified.

Thus she can apply a certain amount of poetic license: in telling the story of Margaret Beaufort she omits mention of an annulled first marriage (which took place when Margaret was seven and which she herself never recognized) and takes some liberties in exploring the relationship between Margaret and her former brother-in-law, an intriguing complication which, along with the traumatic depiction of Henry’s birth and his mother’s subsequent longing for her son, lends emotional weight to a story which risks overdoing the plotting and scheming.

It’s a fine balance, and one that Gregory, whose preeminence in her genre is long established, strikes perfectly. Her knowledgeable approach to writing of the royal women of mid-millennium England, and the deft, empathetic manner in which she unlayers their inner lives, is at the core of her appeal.

The next in the series, The Lady of the Rivers, examines the life of a woman who has played a background role in each of the first two novels, and whom Margaret Beaufort loathed and suspected of practicing the dark arts: Jacquetta of Luxembourg, mother of Elizabeth Woodville.

3 / 5 stars: From tween to Queen.

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