Description:
Rather than exacerbating that winter's gloom, a sudden freezing-over of London's Thames River in 1669 becomes a cause of public delight in Edward Marston's The Frost Fair. "In place of a river, we have the widest street in Europe," exclaims architect Christopher Redmayne, as he observes the myriad merchants and entertainers who've mounted an eccentric celebration on the ice. But this revelry soon cools, after Redmayne and his sober-sided associate, Constable Jonathan Bale, discover a corpse trapped in the glacial crust. The deceased is Jeronimo Maldini, an Italian fencing master who was stabbed with a dagger belonging to none other than Redmayne's foppish, pleasure-seeking elder brother, Henry. Though once friendly, those two gents evolved into bitter foes, and Henry had rashly threatened to slay the duelist. Most Londoners, including Bale, are convinced of Henry's guilt, and the accused was too inebriated on the night of the murder to be sure of his own innocence. Christopher, however, is sure, and so sets off to find the real killer--an errand that will find him nearly drowned in the Thames and crossing swords with a "hero" of dubious acclaim. Meanwhile, the designer detective must fend off the amorous advances of a new client and, not insignificantly, prevent Henry's suicide in squalid Newgate Prison. Although The Frost Fair is actually the fourth of British author Marston's Redmayne/Bale novels, it's the first to see U.S. publication. Like its predecessors, this circuitously plotted work adroitly portrays the alternately respectable and ribald atmosphere of post-Great Fire London. Christopher Redmayne, who labors to restore his city in the shadow of real-life architect Christopher Wren, has matured into a credible sleuth, bedeviled by his sybaritic sibling but forging a relationship of grudging respect with the puritanical Bale. If the tone of this series isn't quite so jauntily whimsical as that of Marston's better-known Nicholas Bracewell books (The Bawdy Basket, etc.), The Frost Fair nonetheless proves itself an historical mystery with thrills on top of chills. --J. Kingston Pierce
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