Where Joliffe Goes to Rouen

A Play of Treachery by Margaret Frazer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A good book. It has some quirks, maybe flaws, but I still enjoyed reading it.

This series has been very entertaining, but this book took a turn, and it almost didn't work for me. Joliffe has been with his traveling troupe of actors in the first four, solving mysteries while they're putting on plays in rich houses or village greens. Here, he gets hired to go to France (to Rouen, in the part England still governed back then) to serve in a rich household and learn how to be a spy, basically. It's a good idea, opening up cool possibilities for the series, but it takes a lot of time.

It makes this a sort of hybrid book--training for a job first and solving a mystery second. In fact, probably 2/3 or 3/4 of the book is about Joliffe learning how to be a spy while pretending to be a kind of losery drunk guy who's about to get fired. He trains in spycraft and weapons in the night while working as a scribe and watching everybody during the day. All this is fine--but it's meant to be a mystery series and the first part isn't all that fun. It isn't until quite near the end that we get a mystery, which is where it gets good. (I was gonna give it a 3 until that point.) There's a murder and an attempted murder, and at last Joliffe is doing his thing, bringing his skills to bear.

I guess the author wanted to give Joliffe more scope for those skills, and I agree with the idea. I expect the next novel jumps into the action quicker.

It's still a brisk read, even the early parts, and by the end it's quite fun. Recommended--in order.

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Where Joliffe Gets a New Side Hustle

A Play of Lords by Margaret Frazer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Very satisfying novel.

This is book 4 in the series, and I'm glad that they are just getting better--more fun, more interesting, more complex. Joliffe is an actor in a small troupe in 15th century England. He's intelligent, a bit of a smart ass, generally ethical but no saint, friendly but not a pushover. As the series progresses, he's getting more and more focused on solving mysteries he's presented with or involved in; it's not just curiosity and gossiping leading him to solutions, but thoughtful action and deep reflection. The more intentional his investigations become, the more I like it.

[Some light spoilers.]
The players are in London for the first time in the series, playing for their sponsor, when Joliffe is asked to write a play that would help promote propaganda useful to a friend of the lord they work for. The play is a success, helping in a small way to spread a message that will smooth over a trade disagreement with Burgundy, but someone else sends goons to attack them and discourage them from continuing in this way. From that point on, Joliffe is trying to figure out what forces are on what side, and he is enlisted by Bishop Beaufort to do more of that thinking and watching and investigating in his service, pretty much as a spy.

Some of the thinking here, in the form "Maybe it's this faction trying to look like this, or maybe it's this other faction hoping to get a different outcome, or maybe it's a third group thing to make it look like the first group..." was pretty deep and I lost the thread. I'm afraid international trade, beyond the simplest level, does not make sense to me, so I just plowed through some of that, but the story is still entirely clear. The resolution makes sense and is satisfying, though (as I think I've noticed in previous books) I wouldn't mind another chapter fleshing out the consequences and final state for some of the minor characters. Much is implied, but I was enjoying the conclusion and would have liked a bit more of it.

In any case, it's a fun book, and as always the setting is well-researched and beautifully realized. Recommended for mystery readers.

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Where Joliffe Goads the Bad Guy

A Play of Knaves by Margaret Frazer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've been enjoying this series and the related Frevisse series. This is the 5th I've read, and they've been consistently (to me) right around 4 stars, maybe 4.5. I liked this one even more, and don't feel like I'm being charitable to say it's a 5 star read.

In this historical mystery set in the 1400s, we find Joliffe and the other players being sent to visit a village that has secrets or some difficult undercurrent troubling the people. Their patron has some interest in the matter, so they go away from their normal route to perform in the area and snoop out what's going on. Turns out, there's a lot, and it's all tangled in family histories.

What I like is that Joliffe is getting more and more unapologetically direct in investigating leads and working out secrets to solve the mysteries that they wander into. He's not a detective, but he's intelligent, inventive, bold, and a bit defiant on the inside. He doesn't do it all alone, and the story is about the whole troupe as well as the villagers, but Joliffe's development and activity is the most interesting part of the story.

There are some pretty evil bad guys here, and it's good to see the mystery solved and their evil plots stamped out. That's always fun. And our hero gets to be the crucial factor in that solution, which for me is absolutely necessary in mysteries like this. I lost a little focus and spaced some of the details, like the corners on the overlapping love triangles, but the author gives us a a satisfying conclusion that solves everything satisfactorily, both emotionally and plot-wise. (It might be nice to see the actors get thanked by some folks they've helped, but I can let that go.)

A good series--getting better as we go. Recommended.

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