Series: Jemima Shore
by Author Antonia Fraser
The Wild Island (1980)
This is not a mystery, really. Yes, there is a death, and it is mysterious, but it is really more of a take on a 1960s gothic -- a woman who is an outsider goes to the strange, empty house and is surrounded by family tensions she does not understand and menaced by forces which she is only vaguel...
A Splash of Red (2006)
Structurally this was much better than the first two; Fraser has found her ground in the genre, here, writing an actual mystery in which her detective investigates, set in a London social milieu that she can write both comfortably and believably. It had a taste of the guilty pleasure, her combin...
Oxford Blood (1998)
Barely average as a murder mystery. Antonia Fraser might be a decent biographer, but she's clearly better at analysing historical characters and events than creating her own. Oxford Blood takes place, rather obviously, at an Oxford college, where there's mystery about the true parentage of an ari...
Your Royal Hostage (1988)
" 'We don't want to hurt her. We must remember that. All of us. She is after all innocent ... Well, isn't she?'"With these words the leader of the secret group tries to establish the ground rules of its conspiracy concerning the bride, HRH Princess Amy of Cumberland, a 22-year-old British Prin...
Quiet as a Nun (1998)
My second time to read an Antonia Fraser (born 1932) book. My first by her was a biography, Marie Antoinette: The Journey (4 stars). Lady Antonia Fraser is the widow of Harold Pinter (1930-2008), the 2005 Nobel for Literature winner. Although I liked this book, I thought that Lady Fraser was a be...