When Falcons Fall

When Falcons Fall (2016) C.S. Harris

Ayleswick-on-Teme, Shropshire in August 1813

I really do love this series.

Sebastian and Hero have traveled to Shropshire to see if Sebastian and learn anything of the man who sired him–the man who gave him his yellow eyes and strange skills–because the man he believed to be his half-brother hailed from there.

Unfortunately, while they are there, a woman is found dead, and the young squire believes her death was not suicide, as it appears, but murder.

It’s interesting, how small English towns have so much in common with small rural towns.

“Happens he’s steward out at Northcott Abbey. Some sort of cousin to her ladyship. From Yorkshire,” he added in the faintly disparaging tone typically used by villagers when referring to “outsiders.”

“How long has he been in Ayleswick?”

The landlord picked up his quill and inspected the tip. “Twenty, maybe twenty-five years, I suppose.”

One thing I particularly like is how the romance between Sebastian and Hero has settled out. Despite everything, they are quite good for each other.

He worried sometimes that marriage to him was distracting Hero from the life she’d once intended to have.

But Hero does still have her own life and interests.

“My predecessor had been here forty years. The old Squire’d brought him in. Gave him— and me— this cottage rent free.”

Hero had been thinking of Archie Rawlins’s father as a drunken boor who foolishly set his horse at a wall he couldn’t clear. Now she found she had to readjust that image. It wasn’t unknown for landlords to take an interest in educating the children of their tenants and cottagers, but it was uncommon. Most saw the education of the masses either as unnecessary or as a misguided, dangerous folly.

In the story she is currently looking into enclosures, which is an interesting historical topic about which I knew little, but would have been incredibly important at the time.

“Perhaps I’m simply getting old. I liked England the way it was when I was a lad. But we’ll never see those days again, will we? And it isn’t only the look of the land that’s changed, I’m afraid; the people have changed too. Time was, Englishmen were part of a community; they had a stake in the land they worked. But not anymore. The enclosures have changed our entire sense of who and what we are.”

The good ol’ days….

This was a really complicated mystery, but it was very good.

There were, as always, many passages that caught my attention, but I especially liked this one in particular, as it is something I do.

“‘I’m not looking for anyone in particular. I simply enjoy reading old tombstones. I like to imagine the lives of the people whose names are engraved there, and think about the love they must have had for each other— husbands for wives, mothers and fathers for children.’”

This is another good addition to the series, and I begin to wonder if Sebastian will ever learn who his father was.
Rating: 8.5/10

Published by NAL

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