Mute Witness

By Charles O'Brien

Picture the Scarlet Pimpernell as a woman—dealing with murder before the Terror made heads roll… It’s the eve of the French Revolution. Fiscal crisis and social tensions brew. Anne Cartier, a headstrong young vaudeville actress at Sadler’s Wells company in London hears terrible news. Her stepfather, the actor Antoine Dubois has mysteriously died in Paris. The official verdict: he killed his mistress, then himself. Anne enlists the aid of Colonel Paul de Saint-Martin and his adjutant Georges Charpentier of the royal highway patrol. But, in her search for truth, Anne befriends a deaf, illiterate seamstress with a talent for puppetry who gives Anne an entre into the Palais Royale. Her quest further confronts her with an amateur theatrical society of dissolute young noblemen; a tormented female botanist; a sadistic aesthete; a rich, well-connected financier; a professional assassin. Unravelling the mystery tests Anne’s nerve as well as her remarkable acrobatic skills. At a critical juncture in the investigation, she acts the part of an exotic queen in Indian costume at a reception. Priceless Indian jewelry disappears. Its owner, an aged count is murdered. And a venal police inspector threatens to derail Anne’s project. The story rises to a violent climax in a vast limestone caveoutside Paris where the city has begun to bury its dead. Historian O’Brien’s debut novel is elegantly written as befits the times and explores borders between countries and between layers of society. Few have chosen to place a crime novel here. O’Brien makes us wonder why.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
• Release date: May 27, 2010
• ISBN: 9781615951451

Reviews for Mute Witness

[adonisguilfoyle · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

So very obviously written by an academic; author Charles O'Brien should have stuck to essays, as his first attempt at prose is leaden and cliched. Characters are rigidly divided into class backgrounds - greedy, vane and immoral aristocrats over the honourable, downtrodden bourgeois, who are forgiven their sins for being maltreated - without deviation, and the narrative is leeched of all colour by the author's blandly liberal/politically correct revision of history. 'Heroine' Anne is so tedious in her independence/capability/equality that I quickly hoped her confidence would be the death of her, and O'Brien rams the point home again and again - 'This woman was strong!' - instead of letting the reader step into her shoes. Everybody admires her, from the love of her socially enlightened noble hero to the respect of her enemies - not one single character underestimates her, or is disappointed by her failings ... because she has none. Actress, acrobat, teacher, street brawler, gunslinger, and yet still beautiful and modest, Anne is sickening and far from sympathetic - O'Brien might have benefited from a little less bias and a lot more depth with his protagonist. As expected, the research is accurate, and I was forewarned from Googling every other detail by a previous review, but the dialogue and action are anachronistic and Americanised (Anne shooting her way out of a tight situation, for instance). I appreciated the step back into 1780s Paris, but couldn't care less for the characters or who killed who, and only finished because I paid for this book.