Mary Reed (1)

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Description: High jinx in the imperial court mixes with lowlife in Constantinople's mean streets...

"If the perfect historical mystery is one that uses the past to let us see the present from a new angle, then this is darned close to being the perfect historical mystery."--Booklist (starred review for Two for Joy)

It is 539 AD and as the reconquest of Italy draws toward its close, a pair of eight-year old twins descended from the last Ostrogothic king have become show more valuable pawns in Emperor Justinian's plans to restore the glory of Rome. Unfortunately, during the performance of a play at a banquet honoring the two young diplomatic hostages, death makes an entrance and claims one brother.

Then Empress Theodora's favorite mime vanishes and John, Lord Chamberlain to Justinian, is ordered to find both the missing mime and the murderer.

In this third John the Eunuch novel, his investigations are hampered by squabbling courtiers, servants harboring social ambitions, an eccentric host, and an egotistic inventor, not to mention the complications posed by a herd of prophesying goats and a protective whale. His friends the Mithran Anatolius and the excubitor captain Felix only add to John's worries when they fall under the spell of two ambitious women. Can the trio avoid Theodora's wrath as they work to protect a child and stop a heartless killer? It is uncertain whether the solution lies within the villa where all have assembled or back in Constantinople--or in some other world altogether.

My Review: I was robbed! Hours and hours of my life, robbed from me as John and Anatolius careen from pillar to post and do very little of any interest! I was subjected to the drear and dull prattlings of an eight-year-old with an overactive imagination, a poor sense of self-preservation, and a somewhat appalling callousness! I want those eyeblinks back!

Characters are summoned forth, do next to nothing, and vertiginously disappear. Some amazing coincidences are mooted, and then dismissed, and then lo and behold come back again as faits accomplis. Oh the humanity, he said, as the Constantinopolitan Hindenburg burns.

So Theodora, Imperial Wench of the First Water, is getting no image burnishment here, and one wonders why the authors don't do more with her. At the moment, she's a cardboard cut-out of a mean girl. My long-term interest in a mystery series is bound up in the characters the author(s) develop for me to invest in and follow with interest. John the Eunuch is interesting, but the other players are becoming tiresome. Reduced by a vastly overcomplicated plot with more coincidences than even Shakespeare would feel comfortable perpetrating on his miserable, long-suffering audiences to broad-strokes walk-ons, Felix (the equivalent of the police lieutenant all detectives know) and Anatolius (well-placed and wealthy young sidekick) come off as boring one-note lech-boys; Hypatia (salvaged serving girl) as a cipher; and Peter (wise old fool/servant to John) as a foolish old man. The suspects, too numerous to enumerate, don't take shape at all. Theodora, see above. Eeeaaarrrgh!

So why three stars, with this litany of whinges and bitches? For this line:

John did not press {the suspect} further. It had struck to him on more than one occasion that the Christians' rigid insistence on their god's exclusive sway, so at odds with human nature, would finally prove to be their undoing.

(p317, hardcover edition)

Fifteen hundred years on is a looong finally, but permaybehaps it's coming to be. I live in hope that it is true, that my shining City on a Hill of Jesuslessness is at last in sight.

In the meantime, the series bought itself one more shot. One. And it had better count. show less

We’re moving into the final week of winter quarter where I teach, with one more quarter left to go after that before summer opens up before us, wide and (at least in our fantasies) encompassing time enough for every read and project we can dream up. Mid-March is the point in the academic year when I begin to feel a bit like a boulder rolling downhill, building up momentum, with not much control over direction, chipping off bits and pieces of myself as I go. Mid-March is also when I start show more looking for promising new mystery series to help me survive the last three months of the academic year.

Lucky me, I’ve stumbled upon one—and there are already ten volumes in the series! This is the John, the Lord Chamberlain, series written by the wife-and-husband (see what I did with those pronouns?) team of Mary Reed and Eric Mayer. The series is set in 6th Century Constantinople, where Christianity is now the state religion, but where the old religions—in this case worship of Egyptian human/animal deities and the cult of Mithra, god of soldiers—still have a strong presence. Faith, as it has been in pretty much every era, is political, as well as personal.

I’ve just read Ten for Dying (the tenth book in the series), in which the John of the series title plays only a minor role. He’s been banished from Constantinople, and the lead player in this volume is Felix, one of John’s friends and captain of the palace guard, a man of middling ambition, who isn’t always quick to see the ways others are taking advantage of him or using him for their own political ends.

In this volume we get an attempt to resurrect the Empress Theodora, which involves a great many frogs; sightings of apes, demons, and lepers, some of this a result unwitting consumption of hallucinogenics; and the theft of the supposed shroud of the Mary, mother of Jesus. Basically, we get big fun, with serious issues a few levels down in the stratigraphy—where they can hold a reader’s interest without turning the reading experience into a more demanding philosophical wrestling match.

This isn’t a book (or series) that will be read in graduate literature seminars two hundred years from now, but it does offer several hours of very enjoyable entertainment. The central characters have some complexity (though those on the periphery are more one-dimensional); the plot won’t make your brain ache, but it has enough incidents of political manouevering to keep things interesting.

I expect I’ll spend a week or so of my spring quarter working my way through the previous volumes in the series in whatever free time I can carve out. I’ll get to know John, who remains a bit of a cipher to me at the moment, and I’ll see the emergence and development of Felix, who’s at the heart of the volume I’ve just finished. And, come summer, I can work my way back up to more demanding reading. show less

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Book Description: Byzantium, capitol of the 6th century Roman Empire, simmers a rich stew of creeds, cultures, and citizens with a sprinkling of cutthroats and crimes. John, Emperor Justinian’s Lord Chamberlain, supervises a Christian court while himself observing the rites of Mithra. Thomas, a knight from Britain; Ahasuerus, a soothsayer; and two ladies from Crete stir up events and old memories for John, who must discover how the visitors link to the death of a show more treasury official.

My Review: First Mystery Novel Syndrome: Introduce characters, drop them for north of two chapters, come back and explain why they're game-changers, drop them for north of two chapters, and then shuffle them off-stage unceremoniously.

Then kill people the main character doesn't much care about, and make them part of the final solution.

Describe dead bodies in such a way that the savvy mysterian will be wondering why the sleuth doesn't spot something immediately; explain this away with Backstory Stress Disorder.

Set your story in a transitional time in history, which allows you to do interesting things with characters' beliefs and ideas. Skate along the surface of this possibility. Offer simultaneously a little too much and nowhere near enough of the tensions this would naturally create between the characters, instead of within them.

But in the end, after getting past the utterly urpsome description of a man being gelded, this first mystery in an ongoing series is just on the knife-edge of good enough to keep me going. show less

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Description: Reed and Mayer combine the scholarship of Steven Saylor with the humor of Lindsey Davis. Starred review in Booklist December 2000.It is now two years after One For Sorrow, and John the Eunuch, Lord Chamberlain to the Emperor Justinian, is faced with a new and byzantine problem: why are Constantinople's holy stylites bursting into flames as they stand atop their pillars? His investigations are hampered by a pagan philosophy tutor from his youth and show more a heretical Christian prophet whose ultimatums threaten to topple the Empire.

Then murder strikes close to home and John has only days to find a solution before he, his friends, his Emperor, and the city itself are destroyed. The sumptuous halls of the Great Palace and the riot-torn streets are filled with the same danger and deception. A colorful cast of characters that includes a runaway wife, servants and soldiers, madams and mendicants, a venomous court page and a wealthy landowner or two -- not to mention John's bete noire, the Empress Theodora -- adds texture to this rich, exotic tale of sixth century life and mysterious death.

My Review: A whole half star above the first book! Added because the series has a footing now, and the conflict leading to the murder is not as far-fetched, and the identity of the murderer and motives of same are a lot more surprising to me than in the first book.

Clearly there is no way I can claim to know that the authors have evoked exactly the atmosphere of sixth-century Constantinople, but they have managed to create an intense and lively picture of it in my mind, and that will serve me admirably.

The eunuch chamberlain, John, has some wonderfully imagined character traits. I like that he's not a Christian, but his servant is, and therefore the servant is allowed to be open in his faith where his Mithraist master must skulk and hide. I like that John the Eunuch is repulsed by other eunuchs, feeling the responses of the man he was before his maiming even yet. I like that John is a wise counselor to many, a good friend to a few, and a serious political animal of the (forgive, please) byzantine court of Justinian and Theodora.

All of those traits play into John's solution to this complex and interrelated series of deaths, bringing them all back to the machinations of...and here's the reason for under four stars...previously unseen agency. The cause of the crimes is believable, the source of the actions taken is simply not a factor well enough developed for my mystery-reader's sense of fair play. Often in a murder or series of murders, the brains and the hands are located within separate bodies, and I feel it's only fair to make that possible for the attentive reader to deduce.

Still and all, I felt the nature of the story and the degree of narrative development between books one and two made this an enticement to move on to book three and hope for even more. show less