Barbara Cleverly: Diana’s Altar
I haven’t picked up a Barbara Cleverly novel in a couple years, despite being a huge fan of the earlier books in this series, which are set in India during the British Raj. Her central character, Joe Sandilands, has since made his way back through Europe and is now back home in London working for Scotland Yard. But enough time had elapsed for me not to compare the books set in India to this one, which is set in Oxford in 1933.
Cleverly has always been a bravura plotter and storyteller; she has twists upon twists and it makes a reader breathless to try and keep up with her facile brain. The opening scene in this novel is a knockout – a young female doctor, bicycling home, is drawn on All Hallows Eve to explore a sinister looking church on the edge of the University campus. She’d been intrigued by a sign she’d seen; but instead of finding some kind of weird cult at work, she finds a dying young man in one of the pews who confesses to his own suicide with his last breath. She’s a doctor so she does her best to save or at least comfort him, and she’s shaken by his death.