Reviewed by Gabrielle Pantera
HOLLYWOOD, CA: “I was accosted by a man who seemed to have a security connection, who clearly regarded me as a suspicious person just because I was looking around me and had a map in my hand,” says Rebels & Traitors author Lindsey Davis about her experience walking down Basinghall Street in the City of London in order to research where Gideon, her book’s hero, would live and work.
“The City is a sensitive area, of course, protected by the Ring of Steel to prevent terrorists planting bombs,” says Davis. “However, it remains a public place and that part is a tourist attraction. The Guildhall is also where they found the Roman Amphitheatre.”
Rebels & Traitors is set during the English Civil War, when Charles I was king and then through to the downfall of Oliver Cromwell (England’s ‘Lord Protector’ from 1653 to 1658). Gideon Jukes and Juliana Lovell are on opposite sides of the war. They meet and fall in love, until their past and historical events move to pull them apart.
Davis had planned to write about an earlier period of the 17th Century, but, “in order to interest publishers, I had to change the period I wrote about,” he says. “My English editor was recommended for my Roman stories because he was supposed to be a classicist…in fact, he isn’t,” says Davis. “I met my America editor at a party thrown by a different publisher who was about to drop me. I was disconsolately eating canapés and he asked me if I knew where the gents was.”
“I read vast numbers of books and documents, visited museums, art galleries and historic buildings, plundered online resources,” says Davis. “It took me three years.”
Rebels & Traitors has a vast amount of historical detail. That’s interesting, but this is a novel and it would have benefited from more fiction to balance it out. There is so much time spent on historical details like battles, people and locations that the part that makes it a novel is secondary. The book is a whopping 742 pages long. Splitting it into a series of two or three books would have helped. With more character development and deeper relationships, it would make a gripping novel, instead of a wonderfully detailed but unexciting book about history.
Lindsay Davis was born in Birmingham and is based in London. Davis writes mysteries and is currently finishing Nemesis, the twentieth novel in the Falco series.
Rating: 2 Stars
Rebels & Traitors by Lindsey Davis. Hardcover, 752 pages, Publisher: St. Martin’s Press; 1 edition (January 19, 2010). Language: English ISBN: 978-0312595418
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