Blood and Fireflies (The Gracchus & Vanderville Mysteries 1)
It’s 1797, and Napoleon, having (sort of) conquered Italy, has paused his campaign so that he can marry off his sisters. The venue for the weddings is to be the Villa Mombello, owned by Comte Mombello, whose association with Napoleon goes back to Napoleon’s origins in Corsica. The air of relaxation and gaiety that Napoleon had hoped to find at the villa is broken by the mysterious killing of geese and pet dogs. Rumours that the villa is haunted by a ghoul start to spread. Napoleon orders the killings to be investigated by a magistrate, Gracchus, but before the he can start, the count is found murdered and Gracchus’s investigation shifts focus. There follows an increasingly convoluted plot, at the end of which two of the main suspects are dead. The second death does seem to be the murderer, but it now seems that there is another killer whose identity we are left to work out for ourselves.
All reviewing is subjective. What strikes this reviewer as overwritten prose and unconvincing dialogue may not worry others, but you have been warned. There is a large cast of characters, many of them real historical figures. Most are sketched out very superficially. General Dumas is a dandy, Berthier is a boring nerd (hardly a fair evaluation). Josephine gets more attention, but she is dismissed too casually. Her lover, Lt Charles, should have been one of the most interesting characters. This is a man who seduced the future Empress of France on her honeymoon and in front of her husband, but all we see is a young man “bubbling over with good humour”. Someone, somewhere will love this book, but it’s not me.
