Kate Hamilton #6
To me this series is an absolute bingeable dream. If your taste runs to a gentle British police mystery featuring an antiques specialist, these are the books for you. In the first book in the series (A Dream of Death), 40 something heroine Kate Hamilton, an American antiques dealer, is in the UK to repair her relationship with her dead husband’s sister and she gets more than she bargained for. In the course of the series she meets her new husband (by book six they are happily married newlyweds). In each novel, there’s an unusual antiquity or archaeological find that holds the threads of the plot together.
In this latest book, that binder is the discovery of a corpse in a site near Kate’s home in Long Barston, one that dates from the 14th century. Because of the way the body was wrapped, it’s almost perfectly preserved, and Kate and her business partner, Ivor Tweedy, have been asked to assess the “grave goods” or the items the woman was buried with. (Berry based this discovery on a real one, and there’s a note about that discovery at the end of the book).
One of the items is an incredible pearl, and when Kate sees it, she has a violent reaction as she does with many of the objects from the past she deals with. In the pearl she senses trauma and terror. The reactions she has are so intense she can’t stop thinking about them, but she’s yet to share this special skill (if that’s the correct term) with her new husband. In any case, the pearl as well as the woman’s body compel Kate to be fully invested in the dig, and even more so when a fresh body is discovered.
Kate’s expertise has earned her a consultancy with a detective agency, and when her combined skills of antiquities expertise and detection are needed, she’s assigned a job. In this novel, the job request comes from the wealthy owner of the manor near the dig, who asks her to try and discover the long-ago dead woman’s identity. The man has his own well of grief – his beloved wife disappeared a decade ago. As Kate gently investigates the relationships between the archaeologists trying to discern the dead woman’s identity, she shakes loose more than a few long-buried secrets.
These are books to pick up if you enjoy the main characters (I do); the description of village life and of Kate and Ivor’s antique business; the pubs and the food within the pubs; and the descriptions of the British countryside. To this long time anglophile, that combination – along with the clever and resonant mysteries Berry provides – are absolute catnip. When I stumbled across book five last year I went back and read the entire series, something I almost never do, because my reading list is usually so long. Reader, I whipped through all of them, hungry for more. This is a worthy addition in the saga of Kate Hamilton, and I cannot wait for the next one. — Robin Agnew