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ANGEL OF DEATH
By: Roy Lewis
HarperCollins: London
1995 (HC)
The violent death and ritual interment of an ancient
Celtic warrior-king and the human sacrifices offered to accompany him into
the afterworld serve as the macabre background to Angel of Death, the
11th entry in the Arnold Langdon mystery series. Landon is the
same quiet, reserved, self-effacing bureaucrat working for the Northumbria
Department of Museums and Antiquities that readers of this quaint series
have come to know and grow fond of. He answers to an ineffectual buffoon of
a boss, Simon Brent-Ellis, and now his new assistant director, the beautiful
and enigmatic Karen Stannard who will prove to be Arnold’s nemesis in future
novels.
The story begins as Arnold demonstrates his ability to
bureaucratically outmaneuver Stannard and thereby gains permission, at the
urgent request of York University archaeologist Dr. Rena Williams to take a
part-time leave of absence to participate in the excavation of a
Romano-Celtic site near Garrigal. The bureaucratic victory maybe a Pyrrhic
victory, however, as Arnold may have acquired a dangerous enemy in the
person of Karen Stannard.
The usually cool and dispassionate Arnold Langdon finds
himself in uncomfortable emotional territory when, from the very start, he
senses a potent evil and dread permeating the site. The site, which
includes a cave with an ancient shrine and a possible burial barrow,
suggests the existence of a death cult marking the burials of important
personages. Arnold is introduced to the small but idiosyncratic excavation
team – three young male graduate students (dubbed the Three Musketeers) and
Elfreda Gale, a brilliant, acid-tongued, free-spirited and very
sensual grad assistant. Rounding out the team is a senior scholar, the
arrogant and completely self-absorbed Professor Geoffrey Westwood.
Westwood and Elfreda get into a blistering academic row
during a cocktail gathering and dinner hosted by their wealthy patron
Stephen Alston, on whose property, Hartshorn House, the site is located.
While not an archaeologist or antiquarian himself, Stephen is the descendant
of Sir Henry Alston, who some eighty years earlier discovered the legendary
Fleetham Horde, one of England’s richest archaeological discoveries. While
never able to match the grandeur of the Fleetham Horde, Sir Henry did
accumulate a vast array of artifacts over his lifetime—the valuable Alston
Collection.
Tensions reach the boiling point several times between
Elfreda and Westwood and the entire crew begins to lose its cohesion and
efficacy as a working team. Finally Rena Williams, in a desperate gambit to
separate the two antagonists, sends Elfreda to do archival work at Hartshorn
House and its rich library of antiquarian resources that may help them
decipher the meaning of their excavation. Work continues apace and Arnold
and his companions unearth three burials near the edge of the barrow.
Shortly thereafter Elfreda, in a visit back on the site, discovers yet
another burial, but this one proves to be perhaps no more than a half
century old. The local constabulary is summoned but this particular cold
case shows few signs of being solved and poor preservation offers few
clues.
Within a few days the entire operation is sent into
total chaos when Westwood discovers the lifeless body of Elfreda Gale and
hysterically proclaims that she has been raped and murdered. The police
re-entry the scene and quickly identify the prime suspects—obviously the
pompous and self-aggrandizing Professor Westwood heads the lest, but upon
further scrutiny, each of the Three Musketeers may have had more than just
collegial relationships with the victim, and there is also a mysterious and
unidentified bearded man that Arnold observed in an intense and heated
exchange with Elfreda a few days before the horror occurred.
But it is a jadeite ring the Elfreda secretly
discovered in close association with the fifty-year-old corpse she
discovered that may ultimately be the link that joins the ancient barrow
burials, the mysterious 20th century burial discovered by Elfreda,
and her own violent death in a chain of violence and darkness on the
grounds of Hartshorn House…violence that very nearly adds Arnold Landon to
the list of victims of this ill-fated site visited far too often by the
Angel of Death.
Three stars for this tidy little mystery, one to be
savored on a frosty winter night in front of a warm and welcoming
fireplace!
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