‘Grave Goods’ by Ariana Franklin (Mistress of the Art of Death Series)

Grave Goods (Mis­tress of the Art of Death Series) by Ari­ana Franklin (2009) is the third book in the series fol­lowed by Mis­tress of the Art of Death and The Serpent’s Tale. The series is told in third per­son but fol­lows Adelia Aguilar, a Salerno doc­tor who works as King Henry II’s agent as his mis­tress in the art of death inves­ti­ga­tion in 12^th Cen­tury England.

In this entry, Adelia is asked by the King to authen­ti­cate two skele­tons that’s heard to belong to the leg­endary British war­rior, King Arthur and his queen, Guin­e­vere. They are sup­posed to be buried in the sacred place of the Isle of Avalon. King Henry II needs a dead Arthur to squash the Welsh rebel­lion and a holy relic wouldn’t hurt to add much needed funds to the King’s cof­fers in order to rebuild the abbey that was burned down to the ground.

The story opens with an earth­quake in Glas­ton­bury. A monk, Brother Caradoc, spots three cowled fig­ures bury­ing a cof­fin in the fis­sure between two pyra­mids in the grave­yard. He sees this as he rushes to retrieve impor­tant his­tor­i­cal records from the abbey. As the earth shakes, Caradoc is felled by a heart attack and with his dying breath, he tells his nephew, Rhys the bard, about his “vision” of King Arthur’s final rest­ing place. It isn’t until some 24 years later that the news of Arthur’s rest­ing place reaches King Henry II and moves him to action.

Adelia and her com­pan­ions, her young daugh­ter Allie, her Ara­bic manser­vant, Mansur and the child’s nurse, Gyltha have been run off from Cam­bridgeshire. The town’s doc­tors have com­plained to the archdea­con about Dr. Mansur steal­ing all their patients from them. Adelia, being a woman, can­not act as “doc­tor” with­out being charged as a witch. So, she and Mansur have been using a ruse where she pre­tends to be his inter­preter as he doc­tors the sick. But the town’s doc­tors have con­vinced the church author­i­ties that the two are “heretics” and so Adelia and com­pany are forced out of the fenlands.

Adelia & the rest soon meet up with Emma Wolver­cote, the young woman from the pre­vi­ous book (The Serpent’s Tale). She’s a widow who’ve been “tour­ing the estates” that her hus­band left behind and ensur­ing that her two year old son, Pippy, is acknowl­edged as the heir. Because the mar­riage was “forced”, the lack of wit­nesses and her mother-in-law’s refusal to acknowl­edge her exis­tence has made claim­ing her prop­erty a challenge.

Emma ends up using a Ger­man war­rior, Mas­ter Roet­ger, in a bar­baric form of ‘bat­tle by trial’ where the win­ning cham­pion wins the prop­erty dis­pute. How­ever, King Henry II intro­duces trial reform and thus we see this turn into a nice civ­i­lized court trial by story’s end. In the mean­time, King Henry II sum­mons Adelia and tells her about the bones found at Glas­ton­bury. Mat­ters are com­pli­cated fur­ther by a fire and a dis­pute between two abbeys: Glas­ton­bury and Wells. The Bishop of St. Albans, Row­ley Picot, is sent to resolve the con­flict and runs into his ex-lover, Adelia.

In “Grave Goods” the main story arc is divided up into sev­eral parts and I’m not going into all of them here. I will say that cer­tain threads are branched off into oth­ers like Emma’s con­flict with the dowa­ger of Wolver­cote manor (as men­tioned) and the arson­ist behind the fire of the abbey (those crazy monks). The author does leave a thread unre­solved to be taken up in the next entry in the series (we have another sick vil­lain on the loose).

I like how the author has decid­edly made Henry Plan­ta­genet, a larger than life hero. Instead of his being seen as the mur­derer of Thomas à Becket, he is seen instead as a for­ward think­ing man well ahead of his time, a man who brought Eng­land out of the Dark Ages with law reform. He is noto­ri­ously known for his tem­per and has a stress­ful rela­tion­ship with the church. Aside from all of that, he is clever, charm­ing and arro­gant. I always look for­ward to his scenes in the story because he makes a great entry and exit.

Yes, there is a romance in here but it is sub­tle and viewed as a bonus by me. You see, Adelia and Row­ley have a past his­tory and they have a daugh­ter. He is now a bishop for the King, a man of the church and she is an foren­sic sci­en­tist who speaks for the dead. In Adelia’s mind, the two are incom­pat­i­ble. Since the two broke up, Adelia has strug­gled with her deci­sion regard­ing their rela­tion­ship but she makes some nec­es­sary changes due to a near death expe­ri­ence regard­ing her belief about women and ‘independence.’

I’m a his­tory buff who enjoys a story that is deeply set in a time period where you have feu­dal land­hold­ing dis­putes, frankpledges and tithing, church pol­i­tics, foren­sics, mixed with pagan rit­u­als, leg­ends, bar­baric cus­toms, sex­ual immoral­ity and mad­ness. If you’re look­ing for a his­tor­i­cal medieval mys­tery with solid writ­ing then you should pick up this series. If I had a com­plaint with ‘Grave Goods’, it would be with the pac­ing as it was not con­sis­tent (but then I am read­ing the arc not the fin­ished book). I felt the mid­dle part of the story dragged a lot but other than that, I enjoyed this story. My grade, B.

Other works by this author include: Mis­tress of the Art of Death, The Serpent’s Tale, City of Shad­ows and under Diana Nor­man she also writes his­tor­i­cal fic­tion of which I’ve read and highly rec­om­mend The Vizard Mask*, Blood Royal*, A Catch of Con­se­quence and Tak­ing Lib­er­ties. Most if not all except her *older titles are avail­able in ebook at your favorite etailer.

Edited: This story is told in third per­son but it’s the type of POV where one for­gets that it is third per­son, sorry.

For Fur­ther Reading

• REVIEW: Mis­tress of the Art of Death by Ari­ana Franklin
• Give­away: Grave Goods (Mis­tress of the Art of Death) by Ari­ana Franklin
• REVIEW: ‘The Serpent’s Tale’ by Ari­ana Franklin
• REVIEW: Blood Royal by Diana Norman
• REVIEW: City of Shad­ows by Ari­ana Franklin
• REVIEW: The Hanover Square Affair by Ash­ley Gardner
• REVIEW: A Catch of Con­se­quence by Diana Norman
• REVIEW: The Vizard Mask by Diana Norman
• REVIEW: Tak­ing Lib­er­ties by Diana Norman

Tagged as: Ariana Franklin, Arthurian Legends, Avalon, British warrior, Diana Norman, Historical mystery, Mistress of the Art of Death series