Customer Reviews

Death of a Musketeer

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4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Sarah D'Almeida has written a mystery for Dumas fans everywhere. But if you aren't a Dumas fan, take heart - the mystery itself is so absorbing that you will also enjoy it a lot.

Dumas is very hard to pastiche - not only does the author have to deal with what people remember of the books, but the author must also work with what people remember from the movies. Sarah D'Almeida succeeds admirably. Athos is complex, D'Artagnan is intelligent and ambitious, Aramis truly is a ladies' man intended for the church, and Porthos is not stupid, but more inclined towards deeds than words.

The interaction between the characters is very much from Dumas, but takes on a new dimension as they struggle to solve a mystery that could leave Richelieu ascendent over both the Queen and King of France. This mystery does have some romantic scenes in it, but there isn't anything that I would object to high-school students reading.

Some of the history in this book is clearly Dumas-influenced, but some genuine seventeenth-century history shines through. The daily life and empty purses of the historical musketeers is clearly evident, and D'Almeida has done an outstanding job of integrating historical fact with Dumas without letting the story suffer.

And the story! Although anyone who has read Dumas is familiar with some elements of the story, they've been reinterpreted in a breathtaking fashion. The mystery was not obvious, and galloped to its conclusion. I tested this with a family member who is not a Dumas fan. She, too, was gasping in the last few chapter. Musketeers, a mystery, and an exciting ride. Wow!

I'm eagerly awaiting the next books in this series.

I was impressed with how authentic the seventeenth century mindset of the characters seemed. And four very different personalities, at that. From the brooding Athos, the womanizing Aramis, tongue tied Porthos, and the young but clever D'Artagnan we see four views of the world. And what a world! The descriptions of Paris and the people of Paris are delightful. The writer pulls the reader so far into the world that one feels that one could easily get lost if one made a wrong turn down a street.

This is not the real seventeenth century, but rather Dumas' Seventeenth, full of the coincidences, resemblances, class prejudice, chivalry, and casual bloodshed in the name of honor that decorated his literary world. A fun read, with a good mixture of characters and action.

LOVED it! A fun, swashbuckling adventure for modern readers. Ms D'Almeida does a fantastic job in this (the first of a series of adventures) tale. The fights are pure classics! With the twist of INTELLIGENT musketeers (something Dumas failed to do!), musketeers out to solve a murder! Great story! I can see why it was selected to be offered as a Mystery Book Club edition. Many kudos to the authoress for an excellent book. I look forward to the sequels!

In 1625 in a Paris tavern, Athos duels with a child D'Artagnan while the other two Musketeers, Portos and Aramis watch when their rivals, five of the Cardinal's Guards arrive. Their leader Jussac wants to arrest the Three Musketeers for breaking the Cardinal's ban on public dueling, but having faced humiliation earlier, the trio agrees to die here. They tell D'Artagnan to leave, but he refuses claiming in his heart he is the fourth musketeer.

They defeat their opponents and go off to celebrate only to see another musketeer who runs from them. They give chase, but when they catch up to him in an alley, they find him dead. However, when they look closer at the corpse, they realize the murdered victim is a she who looks extremely like Anne, the Queen of France. They debate what to do because if the deceased was killed because she is the Queen's double, then they need to uncover who committed treason; if she died because she was in a bad place, then the gendarme should handle the case. Deciding one for all and all for one and agreeing D'Artagnan earned his musketeer status, they begin to investigate who killed the queen's double?

This is a fun swashbuckling historical mystery starring the four musketeers of Dumas fame. The story line is filled with action as the heroes investigate the homicide while adhering to their original personalities. Though the number of suspects remains a bit low, musketeers and seventeenth century whodunit fans will enjoy this changing of the guard from thriller to mystery while retaining the heroic got your back essence of one for all and all for one brotherhood.

Harriet Klausner

Over the last 30-odd years--ever since the first Brother Cadfael novel virtually established the historical-mystery genre--we've seen detections set in every era and in most nations, and have been introduced to any number of real historical characters--Alexander the Great, Theodore Roosevelt, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe among them--solving crime. But never before, except in the case of the hundreds of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, has an author, to my knowledge, borrowed some other author's fictional character(s) and made him/them the centerpiece of a mystery. That, however, is exactly what D'Almeida has done, imagining Alexandre Dumas's beloved Musketeers--Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and their young Gascon friend D'Artagnan--as being drawn into murder and intrigue. Of course, anyone familiar with the original book (to which this is an interlinear) knows that intrigue was endemic to 17th-century France. In this instance, D'Artagnan has scarcely been taken into the trio's fellowship when he and his friends discover a dead body which appears at first to be that of a Musketeer. Closer examination reveals it to be a young woman in a Musketeer's uniform--a woman who bears a startling, and indeed unsettling, resemblance to the embattled Queen of France, Anne of Austria. At first, indeed, the quartet isn't at all certain she isn't the queen, and it's only through Aramis's amatory contacts in the palace that it becomes clear she's not. But the question then arises of who she really is, who killed her and why, and whether her appearance--or the well-known hatred of the powerful Cardinal Richelieu for the queen he didn't choose--has anything to do with the murder. The four find themselves obliged to keep their discovery a secret and investigate it on their own.

D'Almeida offers a good sense of place and a lot of detail about the backgrounds of D'Artagnan and his friends, developed from what Dumas revealed about them. (Gloomy, nobly-born Athos emerges as a particularly sympathetic character as we begin to see something of where he came from--not merely the story of his ruined marriage, which will of course be familiar to all readers of the original, but of how it happened to come about and of the kind of home he grew up in; but Aramis and Porthos's backgrounds are also well sketched.) D'Artagnan's nemesis, Richelieu's one-eyed henchman Rochefort, also appears; the four friends are convinced that he was involved in whatever plot is afoot (which he was) and may even have been the murderer (though he turns out not to be). After a second murder and suitable deceptions and red herrings, the truth comes clear, though justice may seem lacking in the end. This is an intriguing beginning to a new and unique series.

As D'Artagnan, and Musketeers: Athos, Aramis, and Porthos return from the famous duel that began their friendship, they stumble on a murdered Musketeer who turns out to be a woman who may be the Queen of France. The friends decide they must get to the bottom of the murder, which may well involve treason. Only "One for all, and all for one" can save the day.

In her new historical mystery series, Hoyt revisits the characters made famous by Dumas. The France of Cardinal Richelieu is a fresh historical mystery setting and certainly fertile for mystery and intrigue. The richly descriptive writing transports the reader to swashbuckling 17th century France and plumbs the individual Musketeers while remaining true to their original characters.

The only misstep in the tight and logical plot, for me, was the under use of the Cardinal's and Musketeer's clashing purposes. Otherwise, the mystery juggled both new and well known characters in an examination of Athos's character in particular.

Admittedly, I'm only partway through reading this. No doubt I ought to wait 'till it's finished to review it. But I can restrain my review no longer!

I cannot claim to be the world's biggest Dumas expert. I've only read "The Man in the Iron Mask" once, and have never made my way completely through "The Vicomte de Bragellone" and "Louise de la Valliere," despite several attempts. But I've lost count of the number of times I've read "The Three Musketeers" and "Twenty Years After," and I have various sequences of both books all-but memorized. So I come to these "Musketeers Mysteries" as one who would love the chance to see my old friends from Dumas again.

Unfortunately, it seems that this series is not quite going to manage that.

Despite the characters often behaving in ways that remind me of the originals, and various more-or-less direct quotes from the original book, I can't help feeling that Ms. D'Almeida hasn't actually read "The Three Musketeers" or its sequels. This first Musketeers Mystery is, thus far, an odd blend of the musketeer movies, bits and pieces from the original book, and, as other reviewers have mentioned, a jarring number of typos and humorous mis-spellings. It seems that if one is going to say one is basing these books on Dumas, then one should really do so, instead of creating this kind of hodge-podge pastiche. Some examples: d'Artagnan in Dumas has the first name of Jean, while the D'Almeida version is Henri. Aramis is specifically said to have black hair in the original, while this one has blond. The original characters only say "All for one and one for all" once in the entire book, and when they do it, they stretch out their hands, rather than doing the famous swords-in-the-air pose from the movies. But I'm only about a quarter of the way into this book, and they've already said "All for one" etc. several times, and did the swords-in-the-air thing. Aramis's mistress, who he pretends is the Queen's seamstress, goes by the pseudonym "Marie Michon" in the original book, and her real name is Marie de Rohan Montbazon, Duchesse de Chevreuse. But in this book, for some unknown reason, her name is Violette.

I realize that this may seem like an insane level of nitpicking. But these changes are all so pointless. If you're going to base your writing on something, then base it on that. Don't just claim to do so, but create a version so peppered with errors and inconsistencies that it gives the impression you're writing from a cheat sheet someone prepared for you, rather than from actually reading the originals.

This book does have a lot of enjoyable elements. I liked, for example, this interpretation of Porthos's mistress Madame Coquenard. I'll keep reading the book, and will probably read the rest of the series, too. But it's just a shame that these apparently won't be the books they could have been. Dumas fans, take this series with a big grain of salt, and don't expect it to have much more than a nodding acquaintance with the original. If you really want a good musketeers follow-up series, then seek out the "The Years Between" series from the 1920s, by Paul Feval and M. Lassez, in which the Dumas characters meet Cyrano de Bergerac. They are entertaining adventures, and the authors of those books actually seem to have read the originals!

I had to buy this book as soon as I saw it. It was a lot of fun reading more about these favorite characters. I liked the differing points of view. I do agree with other reviews that some more modern terms used were a little jarring, but worse for me was the very poor proofreading. Some sentences grammatically make no sense (Ok, grammar isn't my strongest suit, perhaps, but the mistakes really jumped out at me). There were just so many little errors - characters seeming to forget whose house they're in, dialog attributed to the wrong person, repetitiveness, and simply the wrong words ('Porthos and Athos were good at *accessing* character'?).

I'm not trying to sound mean, or simply nit-picky, and you'll catch a mistake or two in most books. But there's so much of it here that it distracts from an otherwise fun story. I'll be reading the second book, but I so hope the editing improves, as it just made me groan every time I tripped over another one of these problems.

But if you overlook this, it's a fun book, and I look forward to reading more.

I only know the Musketeers from the movies - no good reason why I never read the book, since I love books set in other times. I found this book thoroughly enjoyable and particularly enjoyed the "back story" aspects of it. I will be buying the second novel.

Now the quibble. Throughout the book, Ms D'Almeida uses English is such a manner that it fits with the time period, but occasionally, she uses a colloquial and/or modern English word or phrase that jars. This happened several times, the one I remember best is describing Planchett as having "zits." She could have used the word pimples.

As I said, a small quibble, but for me it was like zooming down a nice, smooth highway and hitting a pothole.

Sarah d'Almeida's DEATH OF A MUSKETEER is a fun, fast and furious read that takes place at the very start of the Musketeer epic, adding an additional adventure before the proper start of Alexandre Dumas's epic stories about the Musketeers. The plot by itself doesn't sound like much -- an unknown Musketeer is dead; who's done this, and why? -- but the additional detail, richness and characterization added by d'Almeida (a nom de plume for novelist Sarah A. Hoyt) greatly add to the flavor of France as Dumas conceived it.

It's not easy to add details like these -- particularly broadening and deepening the Musketeers' romantic partners -- without getting in the way of the plot, but d'Almeida does so admirably.

I enjoyed this novel greatly and am looking forward to reading more additional mysteries for the Musketeers to solve.

Four stars, recommended.

Barb Caffrey

P.S. A longer review is available at Shiny Book Review (put it as all one word AT WordPress DOT com), as the Naked Reader has just put this book out in an e-book form.