I’m a big fan of Nancy Bilyeau’s Joanna Stafford series, the latest of which is The Tapestry. I think she keeps getting better with each book. You shouldn’t miss The Tapestry.
In full disclosure, Nancy and I occasionally share pages of our manuscripts to edit for each other. We’re good friends—a friendship that arose out of my admiration for her skill as a writer. So I’ll show you a couple close ups of what there is to admire in this third book.
Nancy writes thrillers—like the more common, modern version of a thriller, in Nancy’s you are biting your nails with worry about the survival of characters you care about, and danger mounts in alarming and unexpected ways. In Nancy’s version of a thriller, you are also taken vividly back into the world of Tudor England. History with a zing—an adrenalin rush zing. That’s a great premise.
A lot of precision writing goes into making such a challenging premise work.
There are the skillful opening sentences, for example. Joanna was, until Henry VIII made it impossible, a novice Dominican nun. The reader wouldn’t immediately imagine violent threats and spies as the daily substance of a nun, even a nun who lives without a monastery, and indeed Joanna insists she hopes for a quiet life. But from the opening, Bilyeau ratchets up our expectations and set off our “uh oh” radar as readers.
“I was once told that whenever I felt suspicious of someone’s intent, no matter how faintly, I should trust that instinct, but since the man who issued this advice had himself tried to kill me, and nearly succeeded, it was difficult to know how much weight to give his words.
I felt this distrust in a place where all others seemed at ease, as I followed a page through the tall, gleaming rooms of the Palace of Whitehall, filled with the most prosperous subjects of King Henry VIII. To anyone else, it would seem the safest place in all of England.
But not to me.”
The reader is thus plunged into a thriller environment from the start.
But we’re also tugged deeply into this Tudor place and time in ways that stay integral to the story. Bilyeau is one of the best at weaving in the historical details without losing a fast pace. From this scene of opening tension, we jump back in time eight days and move quickly up to this key moment. The eight days are filled with decisions we see as ominous and hints of trouble disguised as opportunity. We feel the warmth of her friends and the invisible knifepoint at her throat. Then in chapter 4 the story circles back to that walk through the Palace of Whitehall:
“The hall, like the courtyard, was filled with men, though these were calm. High above their heads stretched a ceiling possessing as much meticulous grandeur as the gatehouse. The same black-and-white checks, the judicious sprinkling of fleurs-de-lis. Mullioned windows were set high in the walls. It struck me that this was a very modern palace. I strained to remember what I knew of Whitehall—it was the London home of the archbishops of York until Henry VIII’s first minister, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, took ownership and spend a fortune expanding it. After the king turned against Wolsey, he took Whitehall. Just as, years earlier, he had my uncle the Duke of Buckingham executed on trumped-up charges of treason and then took all his properties. That was what Henry VIII did—he took.”
In one deft paragraph, Bilyeau accomplishes four essential things: setting, historical background, theme and establishment of the personal stakes of the main character. That’s a lot in a short span and you don’t feel weighed down as a reader, but rather pulled in.
Bilyeau lays out setting so you are most definitely there in that place with Joanna seeing it through 16th century eyes. We get the giant scale, although she never actually says the room is big. We see the details of decoration and light. Notice how we’re put inside Joanna’s perception—this is a modern palace.
Then we glimpse the darkness hidden behind the “modern” windows and tall ceilings. How did this come to be Henry’s palace? Bilyeau slips in one of the novel’s themes and puzzles—Henry is a compulsive taker (and, we’ll learn, discarder). What are the consequences of this drive? She touches on the specific historical events that prove that theme, thus orienting the average reader with all the needed facts. I’m not a Tudor history fanatic. I need to be told who the players are and which conflicts matter. But I don’t want to be lectured—no lectures here. Just precision strokes with the pen.
And then the ominous close to the paragraph. Henry takes and takes. He’s taken from Joanna through trumped-up charges. She’s walking through the palace of a man who cannot be trusted, most particularly not by Joanna.
That’s a lot for one paragraph to accomplish. I’m impressed. I hope you are and are tantalized into reading Bilyeau’s trilogy: The Crown, The Chalice and The Tapestry.
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Click here to buy The Tapestry at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore
