Stephanie Jane reviewed Into the fire by Manda Scott
Historical storyline is much the stronger
3 stars
I won a huge hardback copy of Into The Fire, signed by its author, Manda Scott, through a Twitter giveaway over the summer. Thank you @followthehens!
Into The Fire is set in Orleans, miles from our current Pyrennean base, and it has a good sense of Frenchness about the writing, particularly in the early stages of the modern day crime story.
Scott develops two stories alongside each other - one being a police procedural set in political circles in 2014 Orleans, the other taking us back to fifteenth century France and the military campaigns of Jehanne d'Arc. For the first half of the book I really enjoyed both stories. The political intrigues of both are interesting and well described. The characters are realistic and Scott has a talent for concisely portraying her scenes to enable easy imagining without slowing the pace with too much description.
However, once the modern day …
I won a huge hardback copy of Into The Fire, signed by its author, Manda Scott, through a Twitter giveaway over the summer. Thank you @followthehens!
Into The Fire is set in Orleans, miles from our current Pyrennean base, and it has a good sense of Frenchness about the writing, particularly in the early stages of the modern day crime story.
Scott develops two stories alongside each other - one being a police procedural set in political circles in 2014 Orleans, the other taking us back to fifteenth century France and the military campaigns of Jehanne d'Arc. For the first half of the book I really enjoyed both stories. The political intrigues of both are interesting and well described. The characters are realistic and Scott has a talent for concisely portraying her scenes to enable easy imagining without slowing the pace with too much description.
However, once the modern day story steps up a gear, I found it headed swiftly into unbelievable events with the characters losing all sense of themselves. It was as if they were merely following a bad Hollywood action screenplay where all realism is sacrificed for relentless action. There is even a random unprofessional romance flung in for no good reason and, of course, the whole plot centres personally on the chief investigator because that's the way these thrillers always pan out. By contrast, the historical storyline stays strong and fascinating, but I found the modern day shenanigans so distracting that it was hard to keep focused. I would far rather Scott had made this purely a historical novel and not tried for the dual aspect. The two stories are only tenuously linked so Jehanne's tale would easily have stood alone and the book would be the better for it.