Review of What Angels Fear and When Gods Die by C.S. Harris

Not long ago, my friend Jean reviewed C.S. Harris’s most recent mystery, Where Shadows Dance, for this website. Now I feel compelled to give a brief review of Harris’s earlier books in the series because I just read them and they are superb.

C.S. Harris was speaking at the Poisoned Pen writers’ conference I was about to attend, and that spurred me to read the first of her books. I much prefer being an informed listener. Now I can’t put her Sebastian St. Cyr series down. I’ve promised myself I’ll save the next one (Why Mermaids Sing) for the plane to Chicago later this week, but I fear I may not make it that long. Never mind that there are other books I’ve promised to review for various people!

These mysteries are set in Regency England at the beginning of the 19th century. They are page-turners with characters you really care about and twists you’ll never predict and all the other fun of a suspenseful read. They are also crystal windows into a particular moment and place. It was delightful to listen to C.S. Harris (whose real name is Candice Proctor) talk about her research methods and her love of history. She joked that her author’s notes have grown longer with each book because interested readers are forever trying to correct her—they have the stereotypical understanding of what the Regency period is like gathered from other less scrupulous writers—and they have a hard time accepting that sometimes genuine history doesn’t conform to their set notions, so Candice forewarns the curious in her author’s notes when some detail or character she’s used sounds unlikely but is in fact taken straight from the newspapers and other primary sources of the period.

The author cited her hero Sebastian as an example of an aspect that people don’t believe could be true to the period. He questions the values of his aristocratic peers, the attitude toward women as even less than second-class, he has lost his faith in God and many of the other underpinnings of a 19th century British nobleman. And yet this is not a modern anachronism of a man, but very much a creature of Candice’s reading of the swirling crises of the period. His views mirror those of other thoughtful men who were willing even at the social heights of their world to believe things that threatened to place them on the fringes. In the process she has created a compelling hero who holds our interest and lifts the mysteries beyond just a fun read. Hard as these books are to put down, entertaining as the love interests and intrigues are, you’ll be mulling over ideas for days afterwards that you didn’t even realize you’d taken up. I dare you not to be engaged! And don’t start reading them if you have any deadlines to meet!