When Blood Lies

[cornerofmadness]

When Blood Lies by C.S. Harris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This time Sebastian and Hero are in France trying to track down his runaway mother who he finds dying after being flung off a bridge. The local police (of which France has more than one branch of) has no interest in the case, claiming that it’s a suicide. Sebastian of course is going to solve this himself and he hooks up with Vidocq who is a real person and an absolutely fascinating criminal turned crime solver who added so much to early police work.

Sophie, his mother, has been living in Paris with her long-time lover Maréchal Alexandre McClellan who fought with Napoleon but has now sworn allegiance to the newly restored Bourbon royals. The Bourbons are more interested in destroying all of Napoleon’s public works that were much needed and losing much favor of the French people who might just be hoping for the return of Napoleon. Naturally, Sophie is somehow wrapped up in Napoleon’s escape from Elba and his attempted coup.

And this bothered me. Lately Harris has been doing the same thing I stopped reading Anne Perry for: trying to hook everything into the politics of the time. I don’t care about that. I just want to read a good mystery. It doesn’t have to be tied heavily into the politics of the time though I can understand the temptation because that’s where historical research goes.

The part of the formula I’m really disliking is the family melodrama. I always hated it back when it was Sebastian and Kat. Now we have his ugly sister Amanda and I’m just waiting for this grandchild to be a boy and her try to grab Sebastian’s title for him (probably after Hendon passes on so not to humiliate him) And then we have what happened to Hero’s mother and what if her father’s newest baby is a boy? I hope it doesn’t go here but I can see it.

I was disappointed that Sebastian didn’t meet up with McClellan so that bit of family drama is still out there waiting to happen or not, given the political environment between their countries. I did like the mystery but if you stripped out the endless political stuff this would have been a very short story. I still liked it. It was well drafted but it might have got that fourth star out of pure nostalgia for the earlier days of this series before everything was hooked into the politics.






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