"Footsteps in the Dew" by Marsali Taylor

 

A historical murder mystery set in an exciting period of Viking history.

1150. Shetland. Rannveig, the eldest daughter, has taken the place of her dead mother helping her father run their small farm with sidelines in fishing and pottery. A stranger is found dead in a nearby stone circle. Clues include a footprint and a bead from a broken necklace. Whodunnit? Members of the old paganism, still celebrating Thor even though the country is supposedly pagan? Or was the stranger a spy for one of the three kings who rule Norway in a supposedly harmonious triumvirate? And why was silver stolen from father's hiding place and then put back? 

Rannveig's investigation progresses against a background of Vikings and crusaders. The setting is perfect and includes such archaic processes of justice as the ordeal by bier-right - when the dead man's body is wrapped in white cloth and laid in the church and each man from the locality must in turn place his hand on the body and swear his innocence and the body is watched to see whether it will bleed indicating guilt - and the steeple run in which a man and his accuser must race for the steeple and the first one to touch it is innocent and the loser is hanged but the kinsfolk and friends of either man can impede either runner. 

It's a story which is full of local colour and it also contains the Marsali Taylor trademark pitch-perfect descriptions:

• "The grassy hill sparkled with morning dew ... as if an angel had sprinkled curled shavings of silver over the green blades." (Ch 1)
• "The amber sun shone on the shorn field, strengthening the hay, sealing the goodness in." (Ch 4) 'Shone on the shorn', what wonderful assonance!
• "The turning point between summer and winter was haustblót, the great harvest feast, held three weeks after the autumn equinox, as the dark ate away at the daylight, and the hills turned from their royal purple to rusted pink. On the lower ground, the marsh grass darkened to olive, and the bog asphodel made patches of burnt orange among the bleaching grasses. The wild geese creaked overhead, dark wings spread against the pale sky." (Ch 4) Not only a description from which a painter could create a painting, but also the dark eating the daylight and the geese creaking overhead. Wow!
• "Rannveig was reminded of the way he had walked up the hill after they had told him Midder was dead, as if his feet were too heavy to life." (Ch 9)

I thoroughly enjoyed this murder mystery which reminded me of childhood favourites such as The Woolpack by Cynthia Harnett and the Henry Treece series of Viking books including Viking's Dawn, The Road to Miklagard, and Viking's Sunset. 

Marsali Taylor is also the author of the Shetland Sailing Mysteries, a series of murder mysteries starring intrepid sailor and amateur investigator Cass Lynch. The series so far is:

• Death on a Shetland Longship
• The Trowie Mound Murders (Buried in a Shetland Tomb)
• A Handful of Ash (The Shetland Night Killings)
• The Body in the Bracken (Grave of a Shetland Sailor)
• Ghosts of the Vikings (The Shetland Poisonings)
• Death in Shetland Waters
• Death on a Shetland Isle
• Death from a Shetland Cliff
• The Shetland Sea Murders
• A Shetland Winter Mystery
• Death in a Shetland Lane
• Death at a Shetland Festival

May 2025, 135 pages

This novel was originally written in 2015, serialised in the magazine Shetland Life.

My paperback edition was issued in 2020

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"1541: The Cataclysm" by Robert William Jones

This book is the first in the Micklegate series. It is an entertainingly irreverent romp blend of at least three genres: historical, thriller and fantasy. The tone is set right from the start with an execution described by a narrator with a very dark sense of humour. 

'Lord' Silas, a village idiot, Robert, Lord Mayor of York, two monks chucked out of the monasteries following the Dissolution, washerwomen ex-nun Elspeth and her crippled friend Wynnfrith, farmer Richard Shakespeare (grandfather of the playwright), Edward Fawkes (father of Guy) and assorted others form an impromptu group (the Agents of the Word) led by a talking mouse with a secret (not just that he talks) and an attitude problem. Their purpose is to save Tudor England from a Cataclysm. 

There were moments when the pacing was spot on (the group coheres at exactly the 33% mark, there is a revelation worthy of W S Gilbert as the 50% mark) but there were other moments when the plot seemed to suddenly speed up. Some elements of the quest such as the discovery of the books and the recovery of Abigail seemed rather too easy. I wasn't sure how the Lizzie sub-plot fitted in but I appreciated that not everyone lived happily ever after. Nor am I sure that I fully understood all the clues in the convoluted plot but it was certainly an ingenious climax. There was even a twist in the mouse's tale. 

Selected quotes:

• "Annie was a middle-aged horse with the strength, dedication and attitude of a foal." (Ch 1)
• "Bacteria in all its glorious forms was here and having an all-night party, but simultaneously, completely absent in the imagination of the sixteenth-century public." (Ch 2)
• "He was a crap juggler spending most of the morning chasing his balls around the market, if you’ll forgive the expression." (Ch 5) 
• "We will win because we are good" (Ch 15) A character who understands the rules of fiction!
• "She’d find a better catch in the river!" (Ch 16)
•  "The King has planted a new Bishop there. More a pawn than a Bishop. " (Ch 17)
• "I didn't have an opinion about this. Strange, you think. Is the mouse unwell?" (Ch 18)
• "'What an unfortunate mismatch of miscreants and misfits!’ He annoyingly alliterated." (Ch 23)

An entertaining slice of horrible history with lots of humour. June 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Nothing Left to Fear from Hell" by Alan Warner

Bonnie Prince Charlie has escaped the killing grounds of the Battle of Culloden, fled across mainland Scotland, and is now hiding among the Hebridean islands, hungry, dirty and frequently sodden, with a few loyal companions, ever alert for a hint of a redcoated soldier.

This short novel describes, in visceral detail, his tribulations.  In the first chapter, we watch as he vomits, defecates and urinates. Warner deploys remarkable powers of description as we endure, with the Prince, the infamous West Highland midges, we tramp with him across then landscape, losing our shoes in sucking bogs. To start off with I wondered if, perhaps, the descriptions had gone overboard, foregrounding the language to the extent that the narrative was disrupted.  for example, the end of the second paragraph states that "a blunt phalanx of fumes manouevred from the outcrops of the low island snuffing its colours down to a bulk." The third paragraph then begins: "A shore emerged from the briny effluvium ..." Words such as 'phalanx' and 'effluvium' seemed to me to shout for attention, as if the author was showing off. But then I thought that this sort of language would be routine if this was poetry. That's when I realised that this is wildly, wonderfully, impressively poetic prose. And, once we have reached the second chapter, the balance between description and dialogue, between observation and action, somewhat settles down, leaving the reader with a story that is nevertheless rendered in language so lyrical as to become a thing of beauty in itself.

Then we learn about the characters, focusing on that of the Young Pretender. He is portrayed as "a chancer who brought havoc" as the author himself says in an afterword. He's a chameleon of a man, stoic and terrified, charming and petulant, selfish and repeatedly self-deluding as he describes the latest roofless byre as a palace and assures his followers that he will return with a French army, at times courageous and at others, such as when he is hysterically frightened of being captured and hanged, drawn and quartered, a frightened rabbit. 

This is a remarkable picture of a human being in all his moods and  aspects and it combines with the rapturously expressive and passionate descriptions of the landscape, a character in its own right, to make an outstanding work of literature.

Selected quotes:

• "Rising and dipping oars sounding like the slap of linen shirts on riverside stones." (Ch 1) What a metaphor! And so in period!
• "A terrible frown cracked along the brow, showing some tender pink in a single serration, like the glistening raw streak against the charcoal of barbecued mutton, skewered fresh and smoking from fire." (Ch 2)
• "The hems of her sacking shroud were a sodden mash that dragged over heather clumps, so the creature's means of phantom locomotion beneath were invisibled." (Ch 2) I loved this sentence from the alliteration at the start of the sentence to the anthimeria of 'invisibled' at the end.
• "Herring gulls passed over low, curiously silent like possible informers." (Ch 5)
• "The way to have peace on earth: blindness for all. For sightless men could make no war. ... The cannon? Are you certain our cannon face them, and not us?"  (Ch 6)
• "The magnitude of these cliffs, no so close and huge above them, was a nauseating thing, putting far away the comforting notions that among houses, formed fields, tracks and hedgeways, as we walk to church, we move in a world God fitted for us with snug accommodation, adapted to the size and shape of humankind and rightly appointed." (Ch 8)
• "It walked like an adrift coo with a deid stillborn hanging out the hole in its arse." (Ch 9)
• "The mountainsides were reflected in those waters below, faithful and absolute, so every dimple and dapple of the braes became imitated and inverted on the dark water surface - it was as if the world was unsure which way up it actually stood, for the steady and gorgeous birdsong was unaffected by inversion, the sound had no top and no bottom." (Ch 11)

May 2024; 136 pages

 Warner also wrote Morvern Callar.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God