Log in to track your reading progress.
Overview
Eighteenth-century London judge Sir John Fielding is back. Now the blind magistrate embarks upon the most puzzling so far of all his cases.. "A nobleman, the last of his line, is executed, and his possessions are set to go to the Crown, when his younger brother, missing for seven years, suddenly reappears to stake his claim. But where has he been? Why does his mother react to him so oddly? And what connection does this case have to the suicide by hanging of an American in London?. "To find the answers, Sir John and his ward, Jeremy, must travel from London to Bath to Oxford - and finally to a much darker place....Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Blind 18th-century magistrate Sir John Fielding, hero of Alexander's popular series of historical detective fiction (Jack, Knave and Fool, etc.), here lends his investigative skills to the mystery surrounding the claimant to the vast estate of the late Lord Laningham. Since Fielding sentenced the last heir, Arthur Paltrow, to hanging for murder, he has a personal interest in the case. As before in the series, events are filtered through the eyes of Jeremy Proctor, the orphan Fielding unofficially adopted, whose natural talent for tracing the logic of events is fostered by the magistrate. The Fielding mysteries are always notable for their sense of place and rich historical detail, but Alexander relies more than usual this go-around on his descriptive powers, capturing perfectly the sybaritic pleasures of 18th-century Bath and the ebullience of the university community at Oxford. The plot, by contrast, feels perfunctory. If the claimant is illegitimate, the estate will go to King George III, and the king's solicitor-general, Sir Patrick Spenser, has convened a secret committee to make sure that the king gets his due. The claimant, who calls himself Lawrence Paltrow and is supposedly the younger brother of Arthur Paltrow, has turned up in England after eight years in the colonies, and his mother, overlooking certain physical discrepancies, claims to recognize him. Fielding reluctantly takes on the task of disabusing the mother. Promptly after his visit, she is killed--a death in which the circumstances recall an eight-year-old unsolved murder. What gray eminence stands behind the sequence of events in both deaths? This is a brisk and picturesque outing, but its relatively weak story line separates it from Alexander's best. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Kirkus Reviews
Death Of A Colonial ( Sept. 13; 288 pp.; 0-399-14564-8): Just as the Crown is about to seize the estate of Arthur Paltrow, a nobleman hanged for murder, Arthur's younger brother Lawrence, missing for seven years, returns to stake his claim. It's up to blind magistrate Sir John Fielding and his seeing-eye dogsbody Jeremy Proctor (Jack, Knave and Fool, 1998, etc.) to figure out whether the claimant is as sterling as the estate he claims.Book Details
Published
December 1, 1999
Publisher
G K Hall & Co
Pages
402
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780783888231