‘You for the sake of my wit, and I for the sake of your sister.’Įveryone has their own agenda and, even when they’re trying to help one another, they are often at cross purposes. Readers are deeply immersed into sixteenth-century Scotland, without the impossible to decipher dialects which often plague such stories. Which would prejudice our friendship, don’t you think?’ ‘May I observe,’ Hew said pleasantly, ‘that if you mean to use that cudgel on my horse, then I shall have to wrap it round your neck. Can he and his friends save society’s victims? That is the question, and I cared. Hew is too humane for his profession of the law. When I say it’s toe-curling – I had a real sense of horror, the more so because she can be understated – it’s not one of those ‘nasty, brutish and short’ books, but about a struggling humanity. Who did what just isn’t what matters I’m a bad guesser at mysteries and didn’t foresee much it was a story about the university, and the kirk, and the society of St Andrews and it was well-ended. In short I’ll read anything written like this, mystery or whatever. It’s like a milder dose of what Robert Low did in The Lion Wakes (also very Scottish). She does a shifting point-of-view that textures the novel, that makes people come alive – she enters their consciousness, and when they’re in an extreme experience, her impressionistic writing can get it across.
_534_300_70.jpg "hue and cry ancient")
Hue and cry ancient how to#
I notice in the author biography she did postgrad study in seventeenth-century prose she knows how to write the sixteenth century into her sentences – without being difficult, but with an authenticity achieved. I’ll go on with my Shardlakes but I found this one even more effective, and Hew Cullan has jumped the queue.
Here I am in 16th century Scotland, in a novel written first to evoke time and place, with a gritty detailed realism, that stands your hair on end. Inescapably I thought of the Matthew Shardlake mystery I read last year – lured by what I’d heard of its dirty streets of 16th century England, C.J.
0 kommentar(er)
