Review: Game of Patience

An elegant, elegantly written, precisely constructed novel of Paris in the aftermath of post-revolutionary France, when La Guillotine still held sway and public executions were the order of the day. But Danton and Robespierre are gone, as is the time of terror when wholesale executions are a thing of the recent past. This is a story of love, of passion, of loss and of great friendship set against the panorama of a great political upheaval.

In school we learned how the people rose up in the late Eighteenth Century and did away with the institutions of royalty; how they established the foundation of the French democracy that remains to this day. But we did not learn so much about the nasty darkness that inhabited a good deal of Parisian society in that time just before Napoleon came to power. Here is a rousing novel that probes and reveals what it must have been like to live in that society, as a police official, as a former member of the upper classes and as a poor workingman ore woman.

The novel is rich in powerful street scenes and characters of 1796 as our guide, freelance police investigator, Aristide Ravel stalks the streets and the halls of power. He attempts to unravel the double murder of a man of some questionable substance and a young woman of a higher class who should not have been in his chambers unattended by a chaperone. The trail takes Ravel through very mean streets and back alleys of a turbulent Paris, as well as into some of the palatial salons and homes of the still- wealthy upper classes, all carefully described in pungent and telling ways.

Alleyn has obviously done meticulous and extensive research and the characters with whom she peoples these pages come alive with impact and care. She writes with a steady hand and her messages are clear, though they never get in the way of this highly entertaining and rousing story. I suggest that to preserve the mystery and the exciting if inevitable conclusion, you not read the jacket copy before you read the novel.

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Carl Brookins - RAM

Book Review: Game of Patience