2011 Book Five - The Devlin Diary

Also on my trip, I finished Christi Phillips book The Devlin Diary. Here is what the back of the book tells us:

London, 1672. A vicious killer stalks the court of Charles II, inscribing victims' bodies with mysterious markings. Are the murders the random acts of a madman? Or, the violent effects of a deeply hidden conspiracy?

Cambridge, 2008. Teaching history at Trinity College is Claire Donovan's dream come true - until one of her colleagues is found dead on the banks of the River Cam. The only key to the professor's unsolved murder is the seventeenth-century diary kept by his last research subject, Hannah Devlin, physician to the king's mistress. Through the arcane collections of Cambridge's most eminent libraries, Claire and fellow historian Andrew Kent follow the clues Hannah left behind, uncovering secrets of London's dark past and Cambridge's murky present and discovering that the events of three hundred years ago still have consequences today....

I read Christi Phillips previous book, The Rossetti Letter, a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. This book is a continuation of the same characters as found in that story....or at least in the modern portion of the book. It took me a while to get into this book, in fact I started this book a couple of weeks ago and would read a page or two each night in bed before falling asleep. It wasn't until I was able to sit out by the pool on vacation and really be able to focus my attention on the book (and stay awake) that I could really get sucked into the story-line. It wasn't as interesting to me as the first book, but it did grab me and reminded me of how much I like history and historical novels. After reading this book, it makes me want to go back to school and study again.... not that I will.

For some readers out there (like my Mom) I would recommend this book. It does have a sense of mystery about it, but it is definitely not the James Patterson kind of mystery. If you are a history buff, I would definitely recommend this book.