‘Face Down’ mixes history with a mystery

FACE DOWN AMONG THE WINCHESTER GEESE, by Kathy Lynn Emerson, St. Martin’s, 256 pages, $22.95.

If you like a touch — well, really more than a touch — of history with your mysteries, here’s just the novel for you.

Set in Elizabethan England (that’s Elizabeth the first, mind you), this is the third mystery written by Mainer Kathy Lynn Emerson. At the center of the Wilton author’s novel is Lady Susanna Appleton, an herbalist extraordinaire and clever wife of Sir Robert Appleton, a sly spy with political ambitions. This is an arranged marriage and Susanna is a bit too astute for her calculating dabbler of a spouse.

But the political plotting is just a backdrop for a series of serial killings that Susanna discovers. Sir Robert has ensconced her in a somewhat unfashionable rented house in London so he can be close to the court as he pursues some mysterious plan, all unbeknownst to Susanna. But she is drawn into it unwittingly as a mysterious Frenchwoman named Diana comes looking for Sir Robert; by the next morning, Diana turns up dead and a constable calls on Susanna because of a note in the corpse’s pocket.

Susanna attempts to help her husband by identifying the corpse as a cousin but soon begins to suspect that Robert may have had a hand in the murder. With the aid of her faithful companion-housekeeper, Jennet, she sets out to investigate the murder. She finds an unlikely ally in Petronella, the owner-operator of a brothel in the area where Diana was killed.

Diana, she discovers, is the sixth petite dark-haired woman killed on the same date over six years. On Susanna goes, interrogating a series of Robert’s male acquaintances at court as she digs further into the killings.

The investigation reaches its climax even as Robert’s wily political plot comes to its fruition.

As murder mysteries go, this one has more intellectual activity than action, but it has two other strengths — its characterization and its historical scene. Lady Susanna is a delightful sleuth, pictured as no great beauty but a woman uncommonly smart for her day. Robert, on the other hand, is pictured with just enough depth to give him a murky, enigmatic role. And his courtier friends are painted with a droll touch.

The deftness of the author is apparent in the area with which she pictures the Elizabethan scene, from palace to bordello. She does it smoothly and with a panache that holds the reader’s interest.

And she only needs a few words to do it, as in this early description of Susanna:

“A good wife would not question what her husband did, but even though Robert had been 27 when they said their vows and Susanna nine years younger, she’d never been a biddable bride. She had an education to equal any man’s and a mind of her own.”

Her knack with description is apparent in the way she introduces us to Diana, who is soon to be murdered:

“She was tiny, making Susanna feel like a giantess. Dark hair showed beneath her headdress, and her face was pale beneath the black half mask. Little else was visible. Gloves covered her hands, though she wore an ornate mourning ring on the outside of one …”

The dialogue and narration add to the novel; the diction is not a distraction as it frequently can be in period novels.

Last, there is a fine twist at the end. All in all, a good read.

Bill Roach is a free-lance writer with Maine roots who now lives in Florida.