shewhomust | The web of story

You know how it is, you read for months without finding a single book with a textile mill in it, and then two come along together. In fact, the last book I read in which anyone weaves anything was probably one of the Abbey School books, and that would have been the Pixie's hand loom, very Arts & Crafts.

But I've just finished Frances Brody's Dying in the Wool, the first of her Kate Shackleton murder mysteries, and an unexpected pleasure. It's set shortly after the Great War, in which Kate's husband went missing. She knows that this probably means he is dead, but she doesn't give up easily, and has been investigating - his disappearance and others. She is asked by Tabitha Braithwaite, with whom she served as a VAD (which is to say that they are very close in some ways, and barely know each other in others) to find her missing father, a mill owner. In the course of her investigations, she visits the mill:

The women, faces alive and expressive, were mouthing conversations across the frames. Sometimes they would laugh, but not a human sound could be heard, only the clatter, crash and clang of the looms with their monstrous metal teeth, shuddering wheels and moving belts.

Everything about this mill felt dangerous. If a man wanted to commit suicide, he could do it here. And if that man were rightfully entitled to enter walkways, climb steep open stairs, cross floors where rattling machinery might crush the unwary, a death could look like an accident. Though it would be a horrible way to die.

And of course, if you have hung a horrible way to die on the wall in Act One...

This is, after all, a murder mystery. Technically, I suspect, it is a 'cosy', though one of the deaths in particular is, if your imagination inclines that way, too unpleasant for me to be entirely easy with that label. And Kate herself is too sharp, too good company to be so easily dismissed. I look forward to spending more time with her.

sartorias, if you're still looking for recommendations...

While I was reading Dying in the Wool, my copy of Kari Sperring (

la_marquise_de_)'s The Grass King's Concubine arrived, so of course that's what I'm reading now. When I know that I will want to read a book, I try to avoid learning too much about it beforehand,so I didn't know what to expect, except that it would probably be comletely different from the last book I read.

And yes, different voice, different tone, an atmosphere electric with magic and strangeness quite unlike Kate Shackleton's dry, sceptical first person: Aude growing up intelligent, thoughtful, bookish, but treasuring a glimpse of a magical world beyond the mundane - and with a promise that this world is not entirely illusory, for it is the home of the twin sisters, who are not witches but ferrets (and I can't wait to see more of what this implies!). Aude, no longer a child but a young woman, is taken to the city to meet her future husband. In fact it is not one city but two: above, the Silver City, all moneyed elegance and fantasy of manners, below, the Brass City, the place of industry and poverty and steampunk. It is in the Brass City that Aude, almost as an afterthought, visits the mill which she owns:

A wide room stretched out below them, lit by tall dirty windows in the side walls. Row upon row of dark iron machines marched down its length, each festooned with tight lines of thread. Women in grayish aprons leaned over them, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, hair tucked up under rough caps and headscarves. Shuttles plowed back and forth; foot pedals thumped and racketed on the hard earth floor. Children scuttled here and there, diving under looms to retrieve clumps of broken thread and floss. The air was thick with fragments of fiber. The lord coughed, tugging a handkerchief from a pocket and pressing it to his mouth. The manager was speaking, but Jehan could not make out his words over the noise from below.

It's not the same mill, but there's a strong family resemblance, how could there not be.

Apparently it's steam engine time.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to find out what happens next.