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Barb takes care of the web orders here at Boffins, and is your contact for book club enquiries. She spends all her spare time curled up on the couch reading and for the last several years has reviewed books on the Afternoon Program on ABC radio Perth.
In her first novel in a decade Minette Walters has moved away from crime friction and turned her gaze on fourteenth century England and the devastation caused by what would later come to be known as The Black Death or The Plague. For many years Walters, who lives in Dorset, has been aware that under the ground she walks on every day there exist ‘plague pits’ - mass grave sites where countless bodies were buried. It is thought the disease entered the England on the Dorset coast around 1348 and wiped out around half the population.
The Last Hours is set on a small Dorset estate in 1348. Lady Anne Develish is in charge of her husband’s lands while he is away negotiating their daughter’s marriage. When news of the pestilence reaches her she takes the unusual decision of drawing everyone on the estate close and allowing no one, including her husband, to cross the moat and enter the manor. Isolating the community appears to quarantine them from the disease, but Lady Anne and her serfs know they will eventually starve if they do not come up with another strategy. News of the outside world is rare, but always bad, and tensions rise within the estate when a young man is found dead.
At 547 pages The Last Hours is a big read, and worth every minute you will spend with it. Walters’ skill at mapping out a plot, which readers of her crime fiction will know, is at the fore, as is her gift for creating wonderful characters. Lady Anne is a fabulous heroine, but she is not alone. Several of the serfs, including the fabulously named Thaddeus Thurkell and Isabella Startout quickly captured my affection. I’ve read and enjoyed all of Walters’ crime novels, but I also love historical fiction and The Last Hours reminds me of Alison Weir or Sharon Penman - great storytelling combined with detailed and interesting historical backdrops. Apparently Walters has not finished with Develish and Lady Anne. A sequel is due for publication in 2018. Hurrah!