A Pawn for a Queen
Sixth in the Ursula Blanchard series, A Pawn for a Queen sends its protagonist to Scotland in search of her wayward cousin Edward, to stop him from committing treason against Elizabeth I by providing support to Mary Stuart. Once in Edinburgh, Ursula discovers she is too late to stop her cousin, who has been murdered in his lodgings. In the course of her quest to find the killer, Ursula endures no less than two kidnappings by a determined suitor who claims to know the name of the murderer.
Perhaps mystery fans will enjoy the book more than I did. Buckley’s series has been praised in other review media, but I found the characters rather flat. Some of their actions seemed to exist solely to complicate the mystery plot and not because the actions would aid character development. Also, I found her use of modern vocabulary jarring. I admit that a book full of “prithees” and “forsooths” would be difficult to read, but a happy medium can be struck between that choice. Also, the author puts words like “pothole” and “migraine” into the narrator’s mouth two and three centuries before their first recorded use. A more serious reservation was the discovery of several misspellings, which any word processor should have caught. One would think a major publisher would have better proofreading resources.
