The Servant’s Tale by Margaret Frazer, narrated by Susan Duerden
#2 Dame Frevisse Mystery
Historical Mystery
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Published: 2.28.20
Time: 8 hours 7 minutes
Speed: 1.25x
Rating: 5 stars
Format: audio
Source: Borrowed
Sellers: Amazon
ADD TO: GoodReads
GoodReads Blurb:
Sister Frevisse is sinfully good at discerning the mysteries of the soul--and solving the crimes of the human heart in this charming series.
It's Christmastime, and the sisters of St. Frideswide cannot turn away travellers, even the players knocking at the nunnery door. But along with the motley troupe comes the grievously wounded husband of the cloister's scullery maid, Meg. They swear they found the drunken wastrel in a ditch, but the tale sounds like another song and dance. Especially when two dead bodies are waiting in the wings....
Now Sister Frevisse must find out if one of the actors is a murderer in masquerade--or face a very unmerry Yuletide season.
Sophia Rose's Review:
The fifteenth century comes alive for a Dame Frevisse historical mystery set at Christmas time in the St. Frideswide’s Priory and local village. Years ago, I read the series and now I’m glad to return to Margaret Frazer’s talented work to get it on audio narrated by the estimable Susan Duerden a familiar favorite narrator.
The Servant’s Tale is the second standalone of the Dame Frevisse series. Though, it reads/listens fine out of order, I will say that there is a flow to the books, characters and relationships and an assumption of how the worldbuilding is laid out that the books are read in order. For those who like to note details, this is the first book where Joliffe the Player and his fellow thespians are introduced and will later go on to have a spinoff series.
The Servant’s Tale opens with a poor villager woman servant’s point of view worrying about how to keep things together with a drunken, lousy husband overdue from his last chance work given by their lord’s steward, her sons running about and leaving their meager animals and hovel home untended while she is working herself to the bone up at the priory earning enough to buy her youngest son’s freedom for the priesthood (which he doesn’t want) and hopefully hold their pittance of land for her oldest son (who’s shaping up to be a drunken brawler like his dad) to farm in his turn.
Her woes increase when her husband is found injured by a troupe of players on the road and the killings start.
Most of the village and priory think the traveling players are the most likely culprits, but Dame Frevisse who shares the narration is convinced that they must look deeper because the deceased were not without local enemies and motives. Although, she admits to herself that she may be biased because her own former life as a traveler has her feeling kinship to the players.
Christmas time at the priory and a series of murders to solve made for an engaging story. I loved the way Susan Duerden captures the tone of the story and voices all the characters, but particularly her Dame Frevisse voice.
All in all, it was a solid story with well written and obviously researched medieval and religious period background, character and plot development and an overall story from two different class point of views. Definitely a recommend to other historical cozy mystery fans.
Author Bio:
To begin with, ‘Margaret Frazer’ was two people, both interested in writing and in medieval England, one of them with modern murder mysteries already published, the other with file drawers, shelves, and notebooks full of research on England in the 1400s. They met in a historical recreationist group called the Society for Creative Anachronism and joined forces to write The Novice's Tale, the first in a history mystery series centered on a Benedictine nun, Dame Frevisse, of a small priory in Oxfordshire. Both character and setting were chosen for the challenge they presented – a cloistered nun in a rural nunnery: how does one go about being involved in murders in that situation? -- and the chance to explore medieval life from a different perspective.
The collaboration worked well through six books and two award nominations – an Edgar for The Servant's Tale and a Minnesota Book Award for The Bishop's Tale – before the ‘Margaret’ half grew tired of the series and amicably returned to the 20th century, leaving the ‘Frazer’ half to continue the series, with an Edgar nomination for The Prioress' Tale.
I write stories set in medieval England because I greatly enjoy looking at the world from other perspectives than the 20th century. My brief college career was as an archaeology major with writing intended as a hobby, but with one thing and another, my interest came down to medieval England with writing as my primary activity, only rivaled by my love of research. But why medieval England, especially for someone who grew up without any interest in knights in shining armor and ladies fair? That’s a tangled tale but the final steps were seeing a production of Shakespeare’s Richard II and soon thereafter reading Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. The complexities of honor and duty and betrayal, mixed with a curiosity as to how the high tragedies of the 1400s came about intrigued me and to understand more I needed to understand how people then saw their world and why they saw it that way. That set me into learning about medieval English politics, religion, philosophy, sociology, economics -- all the multi-layered elements that go into making the lives of people in any time period. I wanted to know the landscape of the time not only outwardly – by way of many trips around Britain – but inwardly – how the world looked and felt to the people who lived then, rather than how it looks to us now. And when the chance came to write a mystery series set in medieval England, I wanted to do it from as far inside medieval perceptions as possible, to look at medieval England more from their point of view than from ours, because the pleasure of going thoroughly into otherwhen as well as otherwhere -- the chance to move right away from the familiar into a whole other way of seeing and behaving -- has always been one of my own great pleasures in reading. As a writer I deeply want to give that same pleasure to others.
So – in everyday life, I’m Gail Frazer, living in the countryside north of Elk River, Minnesota, with four cats and not enough bookshelves. Over the years I’ve had a rag-tag of various jobs, including librarian, secretary, reseacher for a television station, gift shop manager, and assistant matron at an English girls’ school. Married once upon a time but not anymore, I have two well-grown sons who become uneasy if I read books about poisons at the supper table and refuse to turn their backs on me when I say I want to try something I might use in a story. I write more days than not, and when once I moaned that "I have to get a life," my loving family informed me, "You have one. It’s in the 1400s." That seems to sum up things rather nicely.
Website: https://www.margaretfrazer.com/index.html
Sophia’s Bio:
Sophia
is a quiet though curious gal who dabbles in cooking, book reviewing,
piano-playing, and gardening. Road trips and campouts, museums and monuments,
restaurants and theaters are her jam. Encouraged and supported by an incredible
man and loving family. A Northern Californian transplant to the Great Lakes
Region of the US. Lover of Jane Austen, Baseball, Cats, Scooby Doo, and
Chocolate.
As a lifelong reader, it was inevitable that
Sophia would discover book blogs and the joy of blog reviewing. Sophia is a
prolific reader and audiobook listener which allows her to experience so many
wonderful books, authors, and narrators. Few genres are outside her reading
tastes, but her true love is fiction particularly history, mystery, sci-fi, and
romance. Though, sorry, no horror or she will run like Shaggy and Scooby.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sophia.rose.7587
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sophiarose1816
GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/13418187.Sophia_Rose
