The Red Citadel (The Isaac Alvarez Mysteries, 3)
In The Red Citadel, third in the author’s Isaac Alvarez Mysteries, Michael Lynes continues the story of Isaac Alvarez and his family, again setting his story in Spain at the time of the Spanish Inquisition, beginning in 1499. The locations of the novel are, as usual with this writer, vividly and fluently drawn, as are all the other details of the lives of his major and even minor characters, who are consistently well developed, their stories proving logical and cleverly woven into the structure of the whole. Some, like Isabel, Isaac’s daughter, now eighteen, “still unmarried and a governess,” become more dominant and central to the plot as the complexities of the storylines emerge.
Although a strategic part of the series, The Red Citadel works as well as a “standalone” novel as it does as part of an ongoing project, so fans of Michael Lynes can probably expect more news of the Alvarez family in yet more well-constructed and enjoyable reads.
