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The Assassin's Prayer (2010)

by Ariana Franklin(Favorite Author)

4.08 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0593063546 (ISBN13: 9780593063545)

languge

English

genre

Mystery & Thriller

publisher

Bantam Press

series

Mistress of the Art of Death

review 1: "The King of England has called upon his Mistress in the Art of Death - anatomist and doctor Adelia Aguilar - to accompany ten-year-old Princess Joanna on her thousand-mile journey to marry the King of Sicily. They must take with them the legendary sword Excalibur."And so Adelia sets sail with the golden princess and her lavish party of nobles, musicians, servants, laundresses, grooms, luggage and treasure. But when members of the procession begin to die and it looks as though Adelia is to blame, there are dangerous accusations of witchcraft."Meanwhile one traveller, armed with a brilliant disguise and a personal vendetta, has been watching Adelia all too closely. This secret assassin wants her dead... but her wants her to suffer first." (book cover)Couldn't have put it an... morey better myself! This fourth (and last) installment in the series is another great read, for the story itself and for details of life in the times of Henry Plantagenet, great-grandson to William the Conqueror.
review 2: I couldn't finish this book. Perhaps it's because it was the latest in a series I haven't read (which I didn't realise when I rented it from the library), but I couldn't seem to get into the story. Perhaps because I don't know the character as well as I would have had I read the other three books, the idea of someone trying to bump her off didn't really grip me, and other than sporadic forays into the 'killer's' mind, there wasn't much action happening in the part I read (I've returned the book so I can't check the page I got up to). It was also incredibly easy to guess who the 'killer' was; I thought I knew and checked the ending, and yup, I was right. I'm usually a bit slow to guess these things so for me to be correct says a lot about the predictability, which from looking through the other reviews of this book is an issue other readers have found as well.As for the characters, Adelia seemed a bit... boring. I was irritated about the way she whined about leaving her daughter, I though her feelings about this were very out of place in a world with a high infant mortality rate and where leaving children with wet nurses shortly after birth, or having them sent away to be educated at a young age is incredibly common. She would be far too used to this to rail against in in the way she does, even if she does not particularly like having to leave her child. This, combined with her unusual profession made her seem a bit too much like a modern kick-ass heroine and in the medieval setting, it jarred. Perhaps if I had read the other three books before this one I would have got on better with it. I don't think it's a stand-alone book and would not recommend it as such. less

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