TBR Wednesday: A Plague on Both Your Houses by Susanna Gregory

A Plague on Both Your Houses Susanna Gregory Mystery    1996 Rating: C

I was actually pretty excited to come across A Plague on Both Your Houses in a local library book sale.  This year I've read a lot more mysteries, and I find the Black Death morbidly fascinating.   One of my favorite books is, after all, Connie Willis's tour de force on the plague, Doomsday Book.  What excited me about this series is that it starts with the plague and then continues through the social aftermath of the great social upheaval it produced.  Unfortunately, having read this one, I have not so much enthusiasm about continuing on with the series.

Matthew Bartholomew is a physician living in Cambridge which in the 1340's was only coming into its own, having recently received the king's favor.  The book begins with the suspicious suicide of the master of Michaelhouse, a man Bartholomew respected and liked.  His death is followed by other suspicious deaths which unfortunately can't be proved as murders given what little science was known at the time.  Matthew wishes to investigate further, but is warned off by a colleague who hints at inter-college intrigue and whispers to him that Oxford college may be behind the deaths.  Before Bartholomew can learn anything new, however, the plague hits Cambridge, and his skills as a healer are called on and tested to the limit.  The Black Death brings the town to its knees, but strange events make Bartholomew wonder if the sickness is behind every death or if some human killer still lurks in the shadows...

The first half of the book is pretty interesting.  Gregory gives a fair amount of detail about Cambridge and the now long defunct Michaelhouse.  Bartholomew is a sympathetic character, and the first several deaths do pique one's interest.  When the plague hits the town, it continues to be interesting, albeit in a more graphically morbid way.  At the two-thirds mark, however, things stall out.  The focus turns to an overcomplicated intrigue plot and becomes less about Bartholomew nosing about and speculating about who he can really trust and more about his falling into the hands of enemies he didn't know he had.  Part of the problem is that the secondary characters are so underdeveloped that any revelation that this one was guilty or that one was a murderer would have been less shocking than ho-hum.  Bartholomew is the only one with any depth and he's hardly deep.  He also has an annoying tendency to interior monologue ad nauseum. "Could it be...it hardly seemed...he had seen him going into the hall..." speculation fills up the pages of the book's last third.  

Bartholomew has a love interest for readers interested in that kind of sub-plot, but any romantic interaction he has with her Gregory tells, not shows, mostly summing up after the fact for absolute minimal romantic impact.

I really can speak for other mystery readers, but I generally don't read them for the plot.  If the characters aren't fully-fleshed and interesting, I could care less about murder, mayhem, or intrigue.  Since A Plague on Both Your Houses is weak in this area and not especially strong on plotting either, I think it's safe to say I won't be hunting down the rest of this series.  

tags: books  mysteries  tbr wednesday  susanna gregory