Book Review - Jessia Fellowes's The Mitford Trial
The Mitford Trial by Jessica Fellowes
Published by: Minotaur Books
Publication Date: January 19th, 2021
Format: Hardcover, 368 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy
Louisa Sullivan is finally Louisa Cannon. Her and Guy's wedding was the best day of her life. Until a couple of the Mitfords snuck off to Sir Oswald Mosley's BUF rally and her husband was called in to police said rally. But a wedding isn't a marriage. And Louisa is finding it a harder adjustment than she would have thought no matter how almost perfect the big day was. Living with her in-laws, if only temporarily, is a strain, especially when her mother-in-law is constantly complaining about her to Guy. Not that Guy would ever hurt Louisa by telling her this, she just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and overhears them. But despite how hard her newly married life is at least she's not playing dogsbody to the Mitfords. Nancy practically begged Louisa to go on a cruise with Lady Redesdale, Diana, and Unity. The plan being to keep Diana away from Sir Oswald until her divorce to Bryan Guinness is finalized. Just thinking about escaping that fate has put a spring in her step. Until she realizes someone is shadowing her steps. Very closely. She has seen the same man at her wedding, outside the Mitfords after she talked with Nancy, and now outside her stenography course. He eventually approaches her. His name is Iain and the government would like it very much if Louisa were to take Nancy up on the job offer and report back anything unusual that might happen on Diana and Unity's travels. Who they meet, what they talk about, general surveillance from someone who already has the access to get close to them. While Louisa hates the prospect of working for the Mitfords again, as well as keeping secrets from Guy, this might be the first time in her life she's been approached to do something that uses her unique skill set. She hesitates, but knows in her heart that she will accept. Who wouldn't want do their bit for king and country? The Princess Alice departs from Venice for an excursion around the Italian coast. The three Mitford women are in first class, while many flights below Louisa is very happy to have a bed and not a hammock like some of the lower class passengers. At first her job is nothing more than what she's done before, fetching and carrying while pretending she's invisible. Pretending to not notice Unity's attraction to a German SS officer while squirreling away the information for Iain. Ignoring Diana's mild obsession with the twice divorced woman down the hall and thinking that this couldn't possibly interest Iain. That is until the woman's husband is murdered. That's when Louisa tries to contact Iain and realizes she's in over her head. But thanks to her husband's well-timed arrival they can work the case together. Until she's told to look the other way. Until she's told that the truth could get her husband killed. Playing at spies is far more dangerous than she realized. And this isn't her first murder!
In long running series it's common for authors to have a series bible. This will help them remember basic details like descriptions of characters, ages, potted histories. This will not help them if they've forgotten the sun has already risen in the previous chapter or if a witness has already been called to the stand or if they somehow transported a boat from the east coast to the west coast of Italy defying space and time. Jessica Fellowes is in desperate need of this because she actually forgot the ENTIRE PLOT of the previous book in this series. Part of me was like, FFS, she did it again. Because as I've pointed out in previous volumes, she desperately needs an editor to remove all her anomalies, the above examples all being taken from this book, but forgetting the entire plot of The Mitford Scandal is a cut above. I kind of am in awe of this complete amnesia. So what exactly did Jessica Fellowes forget? She forgot that her last book was set entirely on the continent when Louisa was lady's maid to the newly married Diana Guinness. Because when Nancy approaches Louisa about the job offer in this book all Louisa can think about is how she's never traveled. She's lived a small life and never got to see the world before her marriage. In her own words she says she has "barely left England, bar a short trip to Dieppe with the Mitfords years and years ago." And that is by far not the only time she mentions this desire. The chance to see the world is just an added bonus for doing her bit for king and country. A world which she's already seen. As has her husband, because they ran into each other in Paris when Louisa was working there. There's a slight backtrack when Jessica Fellowes has Louisa musing on taking the night train to Paris a few times when she worked for Diana, but it was too little too late. So, why all the musings and wanderlust for a place she's forgotten she's been to? Your guess is as good as mine. I mean, if fictional characters could take a bump on the head I'd say that this happened to our heroine but instead it had to have happened to our author AND any of her beta readers. Because this is a serious plot hole. It's a gaping maw that it was hard to get past. But oddly for me, get past it I did. Why? Again, I couldn't explain it if I tried. It was a combination of Jessica Fellowes knowing that Nazis are bad and my love of a good gruesome death on a cruise ship. Last year at this time I was watching the entertaining, if flawed show, Death and Other Details, about murder on a Mediterranean ocean liner. The Mitford Trial hit the same note and made me feel a little nostalgic. This book isn't perfect and occasionally veers to the absurd with Louisa taking a catnap at a crime scene, but compared to the rest of this series, it was stellar.
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