Wolf on a String

Starred review from April 24, 2017
Black (The Black-Eyed Blonde) displays his mastery of yet another mystery subgenre in this brooding, atmospheric whodunit set in 16th-century Prague. Christian Stern, the bastard son of the Prince-Bishop of Regensburg, has arrived in that city in the hopes of winning the favor of Rudolf II, the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, and obtaining a place among the court’s learned men, such as Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe. The first night he spends in Prague, Stern finds Magdalena Kroll—the teenage daughter of Dr. Ulrich Kroll, Rudolf’s physician and “one of his chief wizards”—lying in a snowy street with her throat slit. Initially a suspect, Stern soon becomes the emperor’s designated investigator. In order to discover the truth behind the murder, he must navigate a realm in which no one can be fully trusted. Superior prose (Magdalena’s head rests in a pool of blood, a “black round in which the faint radiance of the heavens faintly glinted”) complements the intricate plot. Black is the pen name of Man Booker Prize–winner John Banville. Agent: Ed Victor, Ed Victor Literary Agency (U.K.).

April 1, 2017
The first night a young scholar arrives in Prague (in 1599) he becomes entangled in court intrigue and murder.Black, the pen name for Man Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville, here impresses with his literary dexterity as he spins from hard-boiled detective fiction (Even the Dead, 2016, etc.) to a rich, expansive, if sometimes discursive, historical mystery. On Christian Stern's first night in wintry Prague, the 25-year-old scholar and alchemist stumbles across the body of a beautiful woman he guesses to be 17 or 18, "a deep gash across her throat, like a second, grotesquely gaping mouth...her head...resting in a pool of her own life-blood, a black round in which the faint radiance of the heavens faintly glinted." The young woman was Magdalena Kroll, daughter of Dr. Ulrich Kroll, court physician to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II. Of late, Magdalena had deserted her lover, Jan Madek, to become the emperor's mistress. In this dangerous city, simply being at the site of the murder makes Stern a suspect, and soon the eccentric Rudolph calls him to court. A believer in the occult, the emperor thinks Stern is the manifestation of a dream he had in which Christ sends a savior to him to protect the throne against the Turks. Rudolph charges Stern with finding Magdalena's murderer, a task hastened by Stern's fear that if he fails, he will be executed. Shortly, Madek's body, brutally mutilated, turns up in a moat. Stern's hunch that Madek killed Magdalena and then was murdered in revenge is dashed when Dr. Stern's examination of Madek's corpse finds he was killed well before Magdalena was. Feeling inadequate to the task of solving the crimes, Stern nevertheless persists. His wit and curiosity lend style to the tale he narrates but also slow its pace--the new detective never meets an alley or a character he can't resist exploring, knowing, and expounding upon. However languorous the tale sometimes becomes, Stern moves it to a denouement that befits the treacherous times. Patient readers in no hurry will savor Black's dark, vivid mural of Prague at the turn of the 16th century.

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February 15, 2017
Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor in Prague, calls his courtiers his wolves, but when he summons alchemist-scholar Christian Stern, a dissonant note (a wolf tone ) sounds in the court. Stern clearly misunderstands his meteoric rise to fame as the superstitious king's right-hand man and bounds clumsily into the royal presence with painfully amusing naivete. The action begins with the murder of Rudolf's young mistress, whom Stern is the first to discover, and nearly grows into full-scale war as players are shuffled and replaced at the hands of invisible gamesmen, about whom Stern can only guess. Benjamin Black, a pseudonym for literary novelist John Banville, also writes the Quirke mysteries, set in modern-day Ireland. In this intricate, clever, and uncomfortable historical suspense novel, he drops a flawed hero into a seventeenth-century labyrinth without a torch. Unlike Stern, readers will suspect everyone and may squirm a bit as inevitable disaster approaches. Kenneth Wishnia's historical mystery The Fifth Servant (2010) is similarly suspenseful and full of atmospheric detail, while Sara Poole also creates a courtiers' web of deceit for a wilier outsider to navigate in her Poisoner series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

June 15, 2016

John Banville writes impeccable literary works like the Man Booker Prize-winning The Sea, while as Benjamin Black he writes impeccable crime novels starring Dublin-based pathologist Quirke. Here he assumes his Black persona but travels back to 1599 Prague. Young Christian Stern, who arrives there with the winter snows to seek his fortune, finds a well-born woman with her throat cut in Golden Lane, next to the castle of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II. Soon, at the behest of Rudolf himself, our stalwart hero is investigating the murder, which leads him to intrigue surrounding the throne.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.