The Tombstone Maker’s Daughter
This is an ambitious, emotionally freighted novel set in Cornwall in the uneasy years following the Civil War and during the recurring plague outbreaks of the 1660s. Its story centres on Iben Hartmann, daughter of an irritable village mason, and Thomas Huck, the Royalist heir returning from exile and war with a disfiguring scar and unresolved passion for the woman he once expected to marry. Their paths cross again as plague creeps through their parish: a dead child, a dying farmer, and the placing of vinegar bowls outside cottages announce a community holding its breath.
The plot is busy but coherent, moving between Thomas’s troubled attempts to practise medicine with limited knowledge, Iben’s own bruised emotional history and herbal skill, and the wider tensions between Parliamentarian survivors and embittered Royalists. Taylor has a strong instinct for scene-making—Truro’s fair, the sheep-theft in the woods, the grinding poverty of farmsteads—and the novel’s best passages lie in its atmospheric rendering of rural hardship and superstition.
As historical fiction, the research is mixed. Everyday detail feels comfortably grounded. The medical material (theriac, water germander, humoral diagnosis) is plausible for a semi-trained 17th-century physician. But some dialogue is far too modern (“no time for that,” “funny creature,” “not my sort of thing”), and several idioms—“playing two or three fellas at once”—sit awkwardly in mid-17th-century mouths. A few sexual scenes feel tonally contemporary rather than historically situated. Sentence-level writing is generally fluent and readable, though the prose would benefit from pruning: overlong paragraphs, repeated interior monologue, and occasional clichés reduce the novel’s considerable atmospheric power.
Nonetheless, The Tombstone Maker’s Daughter remains engaging—its depiction of plague fear, class bitterness, and thwarted attachment has genuine dramatic pull. Where its style tightens, the novel achieves a persuasive blend of romance, peril and period melancholy.
