The Midwife's Tale cover art

The Midwife's Tale

A Mystery

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The Midwife's Tale

By: Sam Thomas
Narrated by: Leila Birch
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About this listen

In the tradition of Arianna Franklin and C. J. Sansom comes Samuel Thomas’s remarkable debut, The Midwife’s Tale.

It is 1644, and Parliament’s armies have risen against the King and laid siege to the city of York. Even as the city suffers at the rebels’ hands, midwife Bridget Hodgson becomes embroiled in a different sort of rebellion. One of Bridget’s friends, Esther Cooper, has been convicted of murdering her husband and sentenced to be burnt alive. Convinced that her friend is innocent, Bridget sets out to find the real killer.

Bridget joins forces with Martha Hawkins, a servant who’s far more skilled with a knife than any respectable woman ought to be. To save Esther from the stake, they must dodge rebel artillery, confront a murderous figure from Martha’s past, and capture a brutal killer who will stop at nothing to cover his tracks. The investigation takes Bridget and Martha from the homes of the city’s most powerful families to the alleyways of its poorest neighborhoods. As they delve into the life of Esther’s murdered husband, they discover that his ostentatious Puritanism hid a deeply sinister secret life, and that far too often tyranny and treason go hand in hand.

©2012 Samuel Thomas (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Fiction Historical Mystery Women Sleuths Women's Fiction Detective Marriage Scary City Midwife

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Enjoyable medieval mystery

I enjoyed this book. It's the first I've read of this author. I liked the main character. She is interesting and not too anachronistic in character. The plot was just complex enough, the secondary characters well fleshed out, and the setting intriguing without overpowering the story.
The narrator was good. She had a nice voice and did the various character voices well, except for one of the male characters. My only complaint was that she mispronounced so many words. The most jarring was her mispronunciation of 'apothecary' especially since one of the main characters was an apothecary. But there were so many mispronunciations throughout! All in all, though, a fairly trivial issue.
This is one I'd definitely recommend. It's an easy light read.

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