Killing Beauties - Pete Langman (Blog Tour)

Date of Reading: 18/01/2020

Author: Pete Langman

Publisher: Unbound

Publication Date: January 23, 2020

Rating: 3/5

(This review is part of the blog tour organised by Random Things Tours)

About the book:

England, 1655. Following the brutal civil wars the country swelters under a cloud of paranoia, suspicion and the burgeoning threat of rebellion. With the fragile peace being won by Cromwell’s ever-efficient Secretary of State John Thurloe, the exiled king Charles Stuart sends two spies on a dangerous mission to wrest back the initiative. These spies are different, however: they are women. Their task? To turn Parliament’s spymaster into their unwitting accomplice.

Killing Beauties is a dark tale of subterfuge, jealousy and betrayal.

It is sometimes said that women are written out of history, but often they are not yet written in. Killing Beauties is based on the true stories of two female spies from the 1650s and gives them the voice that only fiction can.

Review:

      I am not going to tell that this is a literary masterpiece. But this review is a salute to Pete Langman for his efforts to preserve the bravery of two female spies forgotten by history. There are many loose threads and vagueness for sure, but the book has accomplished its intention of bringing into life the efforts of Susan Hyde and Diana Jennings.

        As you must have garnered from the abstract, both Susan and Diana are part of a Sisterhood which work for the restoration of Charles Stuart to the throne. Their mission now is to infiltrate the secrets of Crowell's spymaster John Thurloe. Susan, in spite of her inexperience and her position as a lady, volunteers to seduce Thurloe defying the protests of Diana. But things are not that easy, are they? What follows is some nerve-racking and emotionally unsettling events which unfortunately the author fails to take full advantage of.

       Yes, the story could have been narrated better. But this is just the beginning of a grand venture. The novel, without a doubt, is an inspiration to future writers to pursue the search for unsung heroes and heroines.

Meet the author:

An unexamined life is one not worth living, or so they say. Well, what if you're too busy living to examine?

Sometimes painter and decorator, professional guitar singer, university lecturer and cricketer, Pete's been quite busy. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2008.

He's written for Prospect, the Independent, the Guardian, All Out Cricket and, most voluminously, Guitar and Bass Magazine. He was awarded a PhD in Renaissance Literature a few years back and his first book was a collection of essays on Jacobean Books in 2011, editing the great Randall McCloud, who went under two pseudonyms for the first time.

In 2013 this was followed by Slender Threads, the much-lauded (honestly) disquisition on early-onset Parkinson's disease, and in 2014 the short story collection Black Box and The Country House Cricketer longlisted for the MCC/Cricket Society book of the year.