27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"A Play of Piety": Joliffe Comes Home Again, December 12, 2010
This review is from: A Play of Piety (A Joliffe Mystery) (Paperback)
Margaret Frazer has done it again--another well researched medieval mystery in a most unusual setting. Joliffe the player has come home from his stint as a spy in Normandy to become a kind of hospital orderly in rural England. He still bears the scars and regrets of his experiences abroad, of having learned how to kill an enemy and of having actually done so. A man of peace, Joliffe suffers from terrible nightmares and feelings of guilt. (Today we might say that he has post-traumatic stress disorder.)
Fortunately Joliffe is here reunited with his friends the players, and with fatherly Bassett, the head of the theatrical company. Joliffe has bed-pots to empty, elderly patients to wait on, and a grimly depicted mystery to solve while the little company waits for Bassett to recover from a disabling attack of arthritis.
The arduous physical tasks, as well as the intrigue, combine to occupy Joliffe's mind and to begin the psychological healing that he sorely needs. At the book's end, as the players take to the road again, Ms. Frazer tells us that Joliffe is contented to be back in his old life and back on the road.
My only regret is that I really liked Joliffe as a spy (in "A Play of Treachery"). In "A Play of Piety" I miss the contacts and relationships that Joliffe had with bishops and nobles in France, the new things he was learning, and the double life he was living in order to survive. I hope that Bishop Beaufort is not done with Joliffe's services, and that Joliffe might even go abroad again in the future.
With that said, I give "A Play of Piety" five stars for its interesting plot development, flowing descriptions and authentic background information, as well as its unusually nasty villains.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More than just a story., January 17, 2011
This review is from: A Play of Piety (A Joliffe Mystery) (Paperback)
Margaret Frazer brings so much more than just a single mistery to her books. To be able to include several story levels that carry through the whole series is an accomplishment that few authors even care to try at one level. Only by reading the whole series over can you separate out the multiple stories. The richness of history at a level that allows the reader to not only identify with the characters doing manual labor but also with the gentry and ruling classes. This is an exceptional series along with the "Frevisse" series.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
So much fun to spend time in medieval England with a traveling player, January 2, 2011
I think Margaret Frazer's greatest strength is in drawing a scene that let's you really sink into the atmosphere of medieval England. I love the way she banishes unfair mischaracterizations and tries to help the modern reader slip into the minds of characters so very far away in time (and often space!)
I found this novel a bit less urgent than many of her others. Oh, there was a murder, but there wasn't quite the sense that our beloved protagonist was really at risk this time. It felt like Joliffe was more a witness than a participant, though that fit well enough with his personal needs at this point in his "life"... That said, I didn't regret a minute of my time spent reading this book. I prefer character development to plot sometimes in a good series like this one.
I enjoy historical re-enactment in the SCA, and medieval healing is a related side hobby, so the details of hospital life were really interesting to me. It rang pretty true, except, perhaps, for the presence of the "defective" children. I didn't mind them being there, but the likely autism of Heinrich felt very modern.
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