Outside of a Dog: Kate Nepveu's Book Log

More backlog clearing: the Julian Kestrel series, four mystery novels set in 1820s England written by Kate Ross: Cut to the Quick, A Broken Vessel, Whom the Gods Love, and The Devil in Music. (Ross died young, so sadly these are the only Kestrel novels there will be.)

Kestrel is set on the path of a detective in Cut to the Quick, when he must clear his servant of suspicion in a murder (having otherwise spent his time in the feverishly pointless life of a Regency man of fashion). This is a well-constructed and engaging countryhouse murder mystery, seething with family secrets and suppressed passions. It does have its rough spots. For one, getting Kestrel to the murder, and giving him the very last piece of the solution, both feel a bit forced. For another, Ross has some point-of-view issues that grate a bit: it's not apparent at first that it's in an omniscient retrospective, and regardless of that, it's never a good idea to have three consecutive paragraphs of this form:

X thought: [stuff]

Y thought: [other stuff]

Z thought: [still other stuff]

Those nitpicks aside, I was interested enough in Kestrel to keep reading the series (and also interested in the very suggestively-named Phillipa, the younger daughter of the family, who Kestrel befriends and corresponds with in future books).

I didn't think that the second volume, A Broken Vessel, was as good. There's a new viewpoint character who we spend a lot of time with, and I just didn't find her as appealing as I was apparently supposed to. Relatedly, the story didn't feel as tight as the first. However, it was an interesting shift from a countryhouse mystery to an investigation into the high- and low-life of London.

I liked the third volume, Whom the Gods Love, very much. It is perhaps a touch over the top, but I found very effective its slow, inexorable descent into revelations of duplicity and doubles. (I could say it reminded me a bit of two other books, but I think to name any of them would be to spoil all.)

The last is The Devil in Music, and the only one not set in England. It's an Italy novel, political and passionate; I think it feels a bit long, and I'm not entirely sure it doesn't cheat here and there. We also see a lot of a doctor sidekick that Kestrel picked up in the first novel, who I just don't find that interesting either as a character or a sidekick.

Kestrel is an interesting detective, and I'm very sorry that Ross wasn't able to take his career up to the founding of an English professional police force as she planned (and that I didn't get to see what she had in store for Phillipa).

(Edited the next day to add: I meant to say something about the Regency setting. My principal associations with the time period are Heyer and Sorcery and Cecelia, so I tend to expect wit and archness with my Regency-era novels. I would say that this isn't my principal impression of the Kestrel novels; there's some witty dialogue, because that's what a man of fashion does, but I remember the narration and the general tone as more serious. Also, they do spend time in settings other than the social life of the Ton or countryhouse parties.)

Tamora Pierce's Trickster's Queen is the sequel to Trickster's Choice. Pierce is always entertaining, and I really appreciate that she continues to try different things—here, she has her protagonist up to her neck in running a revolutionary conspiracy. I have to say, though, that I respect the idea of both of these books more than their execution. I reacted to at least two major plot turns not with feelings, but with, "Oh, so that's how that obstacle is overcome; convenient." Things were just a little too easy for our protagonists, undercutting the credibility of the gritty revolutionary plot. (This is related to my feeling that Pierce doesn't convey grief in a way that grips me.) I doubt these will end up in heavy rotation as comfort re-reads, the way that Pierce's Circle-verse books and prior Tortall books (minus the Alanna series) have.

Wen Spencer's Dog Warrior is another series book with structural problems. It is the fourth Ukiah Oregon book (I logged the first three together). My immediate reaction on finishing it was that it's a pity that Spencer couldn't take the route that Mary Gentle's Ash did in the U.K., and publish the series as a single book (Ash was broken into four for U.S. publication. I appear to have read it pre-booklog, so I'll just say I didn't like it and leave it at that). The weight of exposition to be got through, after three books' worth of both action and history, is really crushing and does serious damage to the book's pace.

On reflection, though, even the Ash route wouldn't necessarily fix Dog Warrior, because though you could get rid of a lot of backstory put in for the reader's benefit, this story switches viewpoint character. That's right, after three books' worth of Ukiah figuring out who and what he is and what happened to make him that way, we get someone else who needs to learn all this stuff from scratch!

The new character, Atticus, is Ukiah's new-found brother (sort of), and so it does make sense for us to be in his point of view as he figures out what he thinks of Ukiah and all the odd baggage that comes with him. But the tension, pace, and exposition suffers so much thereby, that I really have to wonder if staying out of Atticus' head might have been a better course—let us infer his mental journey from Ukiah's keen observation of his actions. (And give us a straight-up "what has come before" prologue too; at some point you just stop being able to smoothly inclue everything important.)

Because of all this backstory to wade through, the actual plot seems almost an afterthought. More, it's another stopgap action in an ongoing war, and I'm left wondering if the larger conflict ever will, or indeed can, be resolved. I found the first three fun and fast reads, and it's too bad that this, the last for the foreseeable future, didn't satisfy.