Book Review: Why Kings Confess

Why Kings ConfessC. S. HarrisObsidian, 2014 Why Kings Confess is the 9th book in C. S. Harris's Regency England murder mystery series starring Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, who in 1813 is thirty years old and happily soaking up the connubial bliss and paternal prospects with his pregnant wife Hero. Fans of the series will absorb this latest one greedily - it's the leanest-feeling of all the books in the series, with all the recurring characters feeling more chiseled and rounded than in any previous installment.Of course, critics of the series will also have plenty of grist for their mills, since, as is so often the case with 19th-century period, Harris is more enamored of creating atmosphere than she is of challenging or frustrating her readers; her skills at plotting improve at only a glacial pace. And although her portrait of St.Cyr's surgeon friend Paul Gibson is the best part of the book ("the two men came from different worlds, one the son of a poor Irish Catholic, the other heir to the powerful Earl of Hendon"), St. Cyr himself stubbornly remains a blank. The play on his name - pronounced "sincere" - has always been a bit on the cheap side (more the tactic of a hack than a respectable writer, one might almost say), and after eight books there ought to be more to him than a set of stage-work props (his golden eyes, his uncanny ability to see in the dark, his fiery "blood hell"-style temper).But however shallow the learning curve (the first book in this series, What Angels Fear, is stupefyingly boring), the storytelling skills on display in Why Kings Confess are noticeably honed. From the freezing-cold Thames in the seedy Cat's Hole precinct two bodies have been pulled, one living and one dead. The dead man is a young French doctor named Damion Pelletan, who's had his heart carved out of his chest. The young woman found with him, Alexandrie Sauvage, is very nearly dead herself; in his little private surgery hard by the Tower of London, Gibson is doing everything he can to save her life. When St. Cyr is called in, he reflects on the grim atmosphere:

It sometimes seemed to Sebastian as if every suicide, every bloated body pulled from the Thames, every decaying cadaver that passed through this building, had left a stench that seeped into its walls, their muted howls of anguish and despair echoing still.

(Throughout the book, St. Cyr's awareness of the violence and squalor of the Regency London all around him is neatly paralleled with his ongoing nightmares about the surprisingly extensive military service he and Gibson have shared; Harris juggles this contrast just exactly long enough to keep it fascinating and make its payoff at the novel's climax very rewarding.)As St. Cyr begins to investigate (and he does investigate, even though he has no real reason to, at least not one any better than the one he makes up on the spot for a witness he's questioning: "just curious"), he immediately gets the sense - from Alexandrie Sauvage, among other sources - that there was much more to Damion Pelletan than he at first suspected. And he's warned off his inquiries by no less a person than his own father-in-law, Lord Jarvis, who, we're told, "controlled a personal network of spies and informers that made him virtually omnipotent." (Little slips like this one - of course a network of spies makes him virtually omniscient, not omnipotent - have remained stubbornly unmodified throughout the entire course of this series)Official and unofficial warnings notwithstanding, St. Cyr barrels ahead in his inquiries, and while she's slowly and sometimes haltingly unfurling her plot, Harris is always mindful to paint her scenery. The seedy daily realities of this book and its predecessors go a long way toward counter-balancing the over-abundance of gazebos that characterizes the Regency romance-fiction that fills that genre's shelves:

He found Cat's Hole crowded with beggars and seamen and vendors selling everything from pickled eggs and salted herrings to cracked old shoes and mended tin pots. The air was thick with the smell of the river and overflowing bog houses and unwashed humanity.

Our golden-eyed hero deals with official obfuscation, the strong-willed gallery of his own relatives among the nobility, and his worries over Hero's pregnancy, and Harris keeps it all moving along in search of the dead man's heart and the reasons for its removal. It's only very rarely in the course of the book that you might have the counter-productive desire to ignore the murder-business and just concentrate on the story of Paul Gibson and his demons.