Riot Most Uncouth: A Lord Byron Mystery

[cornerofmadness]

Riot Most Uncouth: A Lord Byron Mystery by Daniel Friedman

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I only tagged this as a mystery because it's a 'Lord Byron mystery.' Otherwise I would have just called it historical fiction because no one actually investigates the murders including Byron. It opens with a Jack the Ripper esque killing of a young woman while Byron is at Cambridge and she is drained of blood. He is intrigued because of his vampire interests and decides that poets are best at everything so he's perfectly capable of being the best detective ever. (hint he's not).

It should have been interesting. It was merely gross and I'm not talking the descriptions of gore (and the one child death). Bryon is gross. He does no detecting. He decided another student he doesn't particularly like must be the killer and spends the book trying to prove it....barely. Mostly he drinks, gets into fights and fucks (his words) Now it's 1807 so you expect misogyny. I know Byron more by his art than his life and what I do know about him is the Shelley years. I know he wasn't the best of men. I know John Polidori wrote a vampire book about how much of a user Byron was.

But in this he has no redeeming qualities. He spends the book bemoaning his father leaving him as a child, cheating people out of their money, spending money he doesn't have, insulting his teachers, fighting any rival (to prove he's more than his clubfoot) and believing every woman deserves to have his penis and he's going to make sure she gets it no matter how hard he has to cajole her. Oh and he's forever drunk, wandering around with his tame bear, the Professor.

The other main characters include a volunteer guard who's a carpenter and two thieftakers hired by the girl's father. One is a keen intellect ala Holmes, cruel and preferring torture to the science of detection but he uses the latter. The other is a bumbling baffoon.

Others die horrific deaths that seem to frame Byron which of course doesn't really add any tension to the story. That's the thing with these real person professional 'fanfic.' We know Bryon isn't going to go to prison for a crime because we know his life (I'm not sure why using real people is so popular in mysteries or why I keep reading them as I rarely enjoy them).

But the real issue for me is Byron doesn't even solve the mystery, not really. I don't want to spoil the end but it's just bad and breaks a lot of the unspoken rules in a mystery. I don't see me reading another in this series. I felt like I needed a hot shower after spending time with this Byron



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