Agatha Christie’s spirit must be loving this poisonous new historical entertainment. Eleanor Herman has already enjoyed the success of Sex with Kings and Sex with the Queen, thoroughly researched, gossipy revelations of promiscuity among monarchs and their noble retainers during the Renaissance. She is an American author and broadcaster, born in Baltimore, now living in Virginia, but, at 58, she still concentrates her professional attention on the historic immorality and disastrous vulnerability of western European royalty.
In the Middle Ages, when monarchs commanded virtually absolute power, rivalry for every top job was sufficiently intense to motivate assassination, and the least difficult way to commit it was with poison. As viewed through Herman’s eyes, the age of chivalry was one of ruthless ambition, jealousy and murder. She systematically deromanticises the monarchs, portraying them finally screaming in agony on their soiled deathbeds.
Describing the terminal condition of poison victims, she writes — sometimes overwrites — with clinical precision and scatological excesses.
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