Friday, March 23, 2018

What is Tessa Arlen reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Tessa Arlen, author of Death of an Unsung Hero: A Lady Montfort Mystery.

Her entry begins:
I have been absolutely riveted by Sonia Purnell’s biography of Clementine Churchill: First Lady: The Life And Wars Of Clementine Churchill. It is an engrossing account of a strong-willed and ambitious woman without whom – so Purnell argues with authority – Winston Churchill’s political career would have been a washout!

As much a character as her husband, Clementine wholly differed from him in every way: she supported women’s suffrage –Winston loudly did not; she was a Liberal at heart –he was as right wing as they made them then; she counted the pennies and he was frighteningly extravagant. She also loathed most of his best friends and had a notoriously high flashpoint: Winston fondly described an enraged Clemmie as “a jaguar dropping out of a tree.” But how she managed to survive her marriage to him was a constant question I found myself asking.

Clementine was married to Winston at a time when aristocratic women took a back seat in the world. They were...[read on]
About Death of an Unsung Hero, from the publisher:
In 1916, the world is at war and the energetic Lady Montfort has persuaded her husband to offer his family’s dower house to the War Office as an auxiliary hospital for officers recovering from shell-shock with their redoubtable housekeeper Mrs. Jackson contributing to the war effort as the hospital’s quartermaster.

Despite the hospital’s success, the farming community of Haversham, led by the Montfort’s neighbor Sir Winchell Meacham, does not approve of a country-house hospital for men they consider to be cowards. When Captain Sir Evelyn Bray, one of the patients, is found lying face down in the vegetable garden with his head bashed in, both Lady Montfort and Mrs. Jackson have every reason to fear that the War Office will close their hospital. Once again the two women unite their diverse talents to discover who would have reason to murder a war hero suffering from amnesia.

Brimming with intrigue, Tessa Arlen's Death of an Unsung Hero brings more secrets and more charming descriptions of the English countryside to the wonderful Lady Montfort and Mrs. Jackson series.
Visit Tessa Arlen's website.

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Writers Read: Tessa Arlen.

--Marshal Zeringue