The Fugitive Queen (Hardcover)

The plot is well designed and carried through and the characters are well-drawn and memorable. I enjoy the fact that the protagonist is a woman and the viewpoint is feminine rather than masculine. It's all too easy, when writing historical fiction, to gravitate to the masculine, with the hero mounting his steed and dashing off in all directions, with exciting chases and plenty of swashbuckling fights and battles. You'll find a little of that here, but mostly you'll find a woman just trying to do her best for her susceptible young relative and for her queen. It's just that she has an exciting time doing it.

Blending historical fact with dramatic and readable fiction is no easy task but the writer accomplishes it beautifully in this book. You feel the sad magnetism of Mary, Queen of Scots and the dedication and frustration of Sir Francis Knollys, her host and/or jailer.

I found this to be a really good read from a writer who really understands this period in history.

Not in this case. I picked up this book without realizing it was one in a series and enjoyed it so much I went back and read the first novel (and will be making my way through the rest). The way this book is written, it seems more like a historical novel whose main character is reluctantly involved in a mystery, than a book in which the mystery is the point.

Ursula Blanchard is an engaging, strong, sympathetic woman, and her point of view is sensible and shrewd. All of the minor characters are fully drawn-- including poor man-crazy, plain Penelope who keeps getting into trouble through her romantic nature. I knew this book was going to be good when Penelope's embarassing crush on the music teacher was never explained away-- it really WAS a poor teenage crush (so often something like this would be used as a red herring in which the music teacher was involved in a plot too etc. etc.)

Great sense of menace once Ursula gets to the countryside, but nobody is a cardboard villain.

I read this after having completed a disappointing collection of mystery short stories called "Much Ado about Murder," so Buckley's winning me over is even more impressive as I was skeptical that merely setting something in a historical period could make the story interesting... and of course, it isn't the merely the period that's interesting.

Buckley is a terrific storyteller and Ursual is a wonderful narrator. Really enjoyable in every respect!

This is the first book in this series that I have read. I won't go over the plot, as others have already covered it. I found the heroine, Ursula Stannard, to be believable and sympathetic. The history was sound and the plot plausible (if not riveting). I enjoyed the depiction of life and customs in 1568, both at court and in the north.

For all that, I had the entire solution figured out very early on. I think that many historical mystery writers spend so much time "setting the scene" that they ignore the machinations necessary for a really good mystery. So while I enjoyed the first half of the book alot, the last half lagged.