Titus Cragg and his friend Luke Fidelis investigate macabre goings-on in a remote Lancashire village in this intriguing 18th century mystery.It’s the sweltering summer of 1744 and when an epidemic disease threatens the town, coroner Titus Cragg retires with his wife and baby son to a remote village in East Lancashire, where he hopes his family will enjoy the healthy and tranquil air. But Cragg … air. But Cragg finds the rural atmosphere anything but peaceful when he’s called upon to investigate the horrific death of a local woman who has fallen victim to a cruel community punishment. Assisted by his friend Dr Luke Fidelis, Cragg begins to probe the village’s prejudices and simmering hatreds, as he untangles cross-currents of suspicion, rivalry and rural customs which are very different from the ways he knows in the town. Then another local woman disappears, and events take a disturbing new twist …
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“Rough Music” is the latest Craig and Fidelis mystery, of which this is the fifth. This one’s set in 1744.
What does a locket from a London founding hospital, a missing husband, a missing wife, and a bull called Old Nob have in common? You’ll have to read “Rough Music” to find out. All will be revealed, at the end.
The book begins with a horrible mob frenzy in which an ancient custom is invoked to put a wife “in her place.” That ends with the wife’s death. And that’s just the prologue.
Titus Craig, lawyer and coroner, determines to leave his home in Preston because there a danger of illness to his six-month-old son. The furthest away from contagion the better, so the Craigs take a house away from the path of the disease, in a village named Accrington. Bad choice, but they don’t know this yet.
Their new landlord is a strange fellow, a bee-keeper who dotes on his bees. Other residents of the town are not as friendly. Mr. Turvey relates what happened to Anne Gargrave just two days before. He asks Titus to act as the coroner in this case, because Anne Gargrave has died from her ill treatment.
Titus begins immediately to question the motives of the ringleaders. Were they put up to it, this “willful cruelty,” as Titus calls it? The villagers close ranks. Very unpleasant people all around, and readers will have little sympathy for anyone.
The hen-pecked husband and his wife were made to suffer — but what was the true motive? Here Doctor Luke Fidelis (the other half of the series protagonists) shows up on the Craig doorstep, so he gets to examine the corpse of the unfortunate Mrs. Gargrave. Accrington is a small, dilapidated village, and the inhabitants ain’t friendly. Well, they’ve done something wrong, haven’t they? No one liked her, so she is not missed. They want to call it an unfortunate accident. And unfortunately, the jury agrees, so there will be no justice for Mr. Gargrave there.
“To find the cause is not always to find the truth” — so says Coroner Craig. The cause is everything, it would appear. There is something else in the works here, and the author is adept at revealing and concealing, not allowing the characters to be super-human, but having doubt and uncertainty. Readers will also get an expanse of description of the countryside, and the flora and fauna therein. It’s quite the travelogue, descriptive and adding a personal touch to the fictional narrative. The problem is that it tends to bog things down, and this book does start to slow down through the middle, with tangents and sub-plots taking precedence over what happened at the beginning of the book. One know all this is going to be tied together, but it takes rather a long time to get there. Finally, after much tooing and froing, there’s an end to everything. Perhaps not the one that the reader was looking for, but an end nevertheless.
And back the Craigs go to Preston, which will seem tame after their stay in Accrington. And glad they will be of it. Readers should be happy, too.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a copy of the book in advance of publication, in exchange for this review.
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