Monday With Kaye: "The Curse Maker" by Kelli Stanley (Reviewed by Kaye George)

Not only is it Labor Day it is another Monday and that means Kaye George is back! Her first post of the month brings word of a mystery series I have never heard of though I have heard of other books by this author.

 

The Curse Maker by Kelli Stanley

The second in Stanley's Roman noir series finds Arcturus in Aquae Sulis (modern Bath, England). Arcturus, physician to the governor and crime solver, knows his wife, Gwyna,  is suffering, but not exactly why. Ardur,

as Gwyna calls him, makes a trip from Londinium to the baths and the temple of the goddess Sulis--aka Minerva--for her sake.

When a body is encountered at the baths, Philo, an unmarried local doctor who is attracted to Gwyna, asks Arcturus to help determine the cause of death. The dead man, whom no one seems to know much about, was Bibax, a local curse maker. There seem to be a lot of these curse makers, whom the citizens pay to inscribe curses on thin sheets of tin that get dropped into the water. People also drop expensive jewelry into the spring, seeking the goddess's favor. A disproportionate number of Bibax's curses have resulted in convenient deaths.

Ardur has two problems: Gwyna's depression--is it partly his fault?--and what is responsible for the atmosphere of fear and rot at Aquae Sulis. When he and his wife become targets, the urgency is ratcheted up. A possibly corrupt governing body, the managers and drain cleaners of the baths, that doctor that Ardur dislikes so much, a lazy but ambitious layer of the upper class, plus a necromancer all fall under suspicion, until some of them turn up murdered. As this quote states: "Wherever you turned in Aquae Sulis, whatever mean, crooked street you walked down, you always cam back to the temple."

If you liked the award-winning first of this series, NOX DORMIENDA, you'll love this one, which comes out February 1st, 2011.

Reviewed by Kaye George author of A Patchwork of Stories for Suspense Magazine