Belladonna At Belstone

Rating:
Summary: Belladonna At Belstone
Review: A young nun at St. Mary's Priory dies whilst in care at the infirmary; the prioress of the nunnery is struggling to retain her position in spite of accusations of immorality and fraud. The Keeper of the King's Peace, Sir Baldwin Furnshill and Bailiff Simon Puttock are called in to investigate the charges. And in the midst of all this mayhem, another nun is murdered. This mystery lives up to expectations. There are enough twists and turns to keep an avid mystery lover happy and satisfied.

Michael Jecks' West Country mysteries have always been a favourite of mine and I'm always delighted when a new one is published! Definitely a series to be collected and enjoyed again and again.

Rating:
Summary: Belladonna At Belstone
Review: A young nun at St. Mary's Priory dies whilst in care at the infirmary; the prioress of the nunnery is struggling to retain her position in spite of accusations of immorality and fraud. The Keeper of the King's Peace, Sir Baldwin Furnshill and Bailiff Simon Puttock are called in to investigate the charges. And in the midst of all this mayhem, another nun is murdered. This mystery lives up to expectations. There are enough twists and turns to keep an avid mystery lover happy and satisfied.

Michael Jecks' West Country mysteries have always been a favourite of mine and I'm always delighted when a new one is published! Definitely a series to be collected and enjoyed again and again.

Rating:
Summary: Belladonna At Belstone
Review: I'm afraid that I still found this novel to be more depressing than anything else. Even given the time period of the story, and the fact that at that time some women who were not fit to be nuns ended up in convents, I found all of the nuns in the story to be such liars and so plainly unfit to be nuns that I felt the convent shouldn't have been left standing at the end of the story. It didn't seem to me that there was even one woman within the story who really should have stayed in the convent. Perhaps Lady Elizabeth and Margherita came the closest - by the end of the story - to becoming "real nuns."

Rating:
Summary: Story is well-written, and there is plenty of mystery, but--
Review: I'm afraid that I still found this novel to be more depressing than anything else. Even given the time period of the story, and the fact that at that time some women who were not fit to be nuns ended up in convents, I found all of the nuns in the story to be such liars and so plainly unfit to be nuns that I felt the convent shouldn't have been left standing at the end of the story. It didn't seem to me that there was even one woman within the story who really should have stayed in the convent. Perhaps Lady Elizabeth and Margherita came the closest - by the end of the story - to becoming "real nuns."

Rating:
Summary: Immorality runs rampant
Review: In looking for a new mystery series, I decided to try a book by Michael Jecks and chose this one. It was awful. You could hardly pay attention to the mystery (which was not a winner anyway) for the garbage about the nuns and monks carrying on various affairs. I know that there were people who did not keep their vows, but I honestly doubt that there was ever a convent so filled to the brim with promiscuity. As a reader, you never turned a corner without coming upon a dishevelled nun coming out of the bushes.

For someone who was brought up on Ellis Peters' Cadfael or Margaret Frazer's Dame Frevisse or any of the hundreds of other historical mysteries, I can definitely recommend NOT buying this book. As I said, it was awful.