Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:52:19 -0400
From: Kathleen Silc
Subject: Friends of the Pittsboro Memorial Library Book Club
Friends of the Pittsboro Memorial Library Book Club will meet on Tuesday, August 5 at 6:45 pm in the Reeves Gallery at the library. The book selection is “The Mistress of the Art of Death” by Arianna Franklin. (Fiction).
It’s hard enough to produce a gripping thriller — harder still to write convincing historical fiction that recreates a living, breathing past. But this terrific book does both, and does it with a cast of characters so vivid and engaging that you’d be happy to read about them even if they weren’t on the track of a sexually depraved serial child-murderer.
Mistress of the Art of Death opens with a clever takeoff on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which introduces the central players, a group of pilgrims returning from the shrine of the newly canonized St. Thomas à Becket: a prior and a prioress (from rival abbeys); two knights, lately returned from the Crusades; an overweight but very shrewd tax collector; a gaggle of citizens; and three Gypsies, who are in fact secret investigators sent by the king of Sicily to discover the truth behind a series of gruesome murders near Cambridge.
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