{"id":3032,"date":"2019-03-21T05:19:06","date_gmt":"2019-03-21T12:19:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=3032"},"modified":"2019-03-21T05:19:06","modified_gmt":"2019-03-21T12:19:06","slug":"anna-lee-huber-an-artless-demise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/anna-lee-huber-an-artless-demise\/","title":{"rendered":"Anna Lee Huber: An Artless Demise"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The seventh in Huber\u2019s enjoyable Lady Darby series, this novel finds the lovely and talented Kiera happily married to investigator Sebastian Gage and pregnant with her first child. At this point, the talented Huber is a nice cross between the romance of Tasha Alexander and the social commentary that Anne Perry focuses on in her novels. In 1830\u2019s London, there\u2019s plenty of social injustice to go around, though that is far from Huber\u2019s main theme.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always loved the premise of these novels. Kiera is a painter who was forced, under her first husband\u2019s tutelage, to create precise anatomical drawings from corpses he obtained probably through illegal means. At the time, the idea of an autopsy or of learning from a human body was considered something of a scandal. When Kiera\u2019s first husband dies, she\u2019s forced to retreat to her sister\u2019s home in Scotland because her work for her husband has made her notorious.
\nIt gives Kiera a fabulous backstory \u2013 her first husband\u2019s treatment of her is always at the back of her mind, and her lack of acceptance by conventional members of the \u201cton\u201d make every social occasion a minefield. Luckily, her present husband, Gage, is a model of kindness and they are a wonderful detecting pair.<\/p>\n

In this novel, Huber draws on the actual Burke and Hare, notorious for murdering people and selling the corpses to medical schools or doctors. The term \u201cBurking\u201d comes from this nefarious Edinburgh criminal, and when a young boy is discovered dead not long before the discovery of an Earl\u2019s son, both of them appearing to be \u201cburked,\u201d the entire city is on edge and Kiera\u2019s past is raked up once again. She works as a portrait painter, and her commissions begin to be cancelled.<\/p>\n

Nicely balancing the details of Kiera\u2019s and Gage\u2019s solidly upper middle-class life as well as their respective relationships with their maid and manservant, the story follows the pair as they try and solve an unfortunate string of murders of young men. They are desperate to figure out the connection between them, though it\u2019s ultimately clear they have not actually been \u201cburked\u201d.<\/p>\n

Surrounding the story \u2013 I think the Victorians would have called it a \u201cmiasma\u201d \u2013 are the squalid conditions of the London poor and the many, many children who are put to work on the streets, begging, stealing or much worse. The dead boy is one of these sad tales and the discovery of the details of his life leads Kiera to some personal insights regarding those closest to her, by dint of affection or relation.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a real heart to these books and a true sense of humanity that lights up Huber\u2019s well told stories. While Lady Darby may feel at the end of this novel that some of her emotional issues have been resolved, Huber lays the ground for her next adventure and I for one cannot wait to read it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The seventh in Huber\u2019s enjoyable Lady Darby series, this novel finds the lovely and talented Kiera happily married to investigator Sebastian Gage and pregnant with her first child. At this point, the talented Huber is a nice cross between the romance of Tasha Alexander and the social commentary that Anne Perry focuses on in her … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[89,90,10,88],"class_list":["post-3032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-anna-lee-huber","tag-burke-hare","tag-historical","tag-lady-darby"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3032"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3034,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3032\/revisions\/3034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}