The Shadows of London (James Marwood & Cat Lovett, 6)
The Shadows of London is the latest in Andrew Taylor’s enjoyable series of novels set in Restoration London. It is 1671, and Cat Hakesby is potentially facing ruin as her architectural firm is forced to stop work on an old almshouse, where a grotesquely disfigured corpse has been discovered. Meanwhile James Marwood, a Whitehall clerk, starts to investigate the disappearance of a government scribe, and is soon drawn into danger himself. And King Charles II is on the verge of taking a new mistress, who is young, beguiling – and French.
The different strands of the story start to become entangled in mysterious ways. But, as always when Cat and Marwood find their paths crossing, things are not necessarily what they seem. And the truth may not always prevail.
The novel is based on a true episode: the attempt by powerful English ministers and the French government to install a Frenchwoman in the monarch’s bed. The author speaks of the ‘unhealthy connection between sex and power’, and he explores this at all levels of society, from the aristocratic but mostly helpless Louise de Keroualle to Grace Hadgraft, the beautiful merchant’s daughter who ultimately has little choice in who she marries.
The book is full of evocative descriptions of 17th-century London, with colour added by extra details such as the peculiar legal status of the Bishop of Ely’s liberty in Holborn. More than others in the series it also exposes the corruption at the heart of government – the private agendas and the covering up of unfortunate facts. A lesson for our times perhaps? Thoroughly recommended.
