Disordered Daggers : Havana Sleeping by Martin Davies (2014)
Havana, 1853 - a night watchman has been murdered at the British consulate. Leonarda Leigh, the young widow of an English plantation owner, wants to know why. Meanwhile a young diplomat, George Backhouse, has arrived to take up his surprise appointment to the post of Judge in the Havana Mixed Commission for the Suppression of the Slave Trade - a surprise given his lack of obvious career success before. And back in England John Jerusalems receives visitors from the Foreign Office and intelligence from many quarters.
This book is exactly why I devote reading time to working through the Dagger shortlists - something that I wouldn’t have picked up otherwise, this was right up my street (or shadowy Cuban alley). Martin Davies extrapolates a wonderful yarn from facts in the historical record, the way that Robert Harris explored the Dreyfus Affair in “An Officer and a Spy”. Backhouse soon discovers how far out of his depth he is as the new man in Havana, dealing with a consul who ignores him, junior diplomats who are embroiled in scandals of their own, and thrown together with the American representative Jepson, who “looked like a brawler, a prize-fighter, a great hunk of muscle and bone squeezed into an excellent linen suit.”
Leonarda’s investigation into the death of the night watchman takes her to some dangerous places, and some painful memories of the past she had escaped. Add to the mix spies, secret letters, realpolitik, and some lovely evocative Cuban landscapes and customs, and you have a book which I didn’t want to finish. Martin Davies is completely in control of his narrative and had me equally completely hooked. Highly recommended.
This book is exactly why I devote reading time to working through the Dagger shortlists - something that I wouldn’t have picked up otherwise, this was right up my street (or shadowy Cuban alley). Martin Davies extrapolates a wonderful yarn from facts in the historical record, the way that Robert Harris explored the Dreyfus Affair in “An Officer and a Spy”. Backhouse soon discovers how far out of his depth he is as the new man in Havana, dealing with a consul who ignores him, junior diplomats who are embroiled in scandals of their own, and thrown together with the American representative Jepson, who “looked like a brawler, a prize-fighter, a great hunk of muscle and bone squeezed into an excellent linen suit.”
Leonarda’s investigation into the death of the night watchman takes her to some dangerous places, and some painful memories of the past she had escaped. Add to the mix spies, secret letters, realpolitik, and some lovely evocative Cuban landscapes and customs, and you have a book which I didn’t want to finish. Martin Davies is completely in control of his narrative and had me equally completely hooked. Highly recommended.