[Book review] Dark Jenny by Alex Bledsoe

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One of fantasy’s most prevalent stories is, of course, the King Arthur myth.  Any story that survives hundreds of years and thousands of retellings obviously has some staying power.  You might think that the Arthur tale has been done to death, but that’s not true.  Rather than growing stale, the myth lends itself to some very creative re-imaginings.  Among them is Alex Bledsoe’s Dark Jenny, a whodunit set in the last days of an alternate King Arthur’s reign.

Sword jockey Eddie LaCrosse is having a peaceful drink in a bar when he gets a very unusual delivery: a coffin, accompanied by a note, which came from the island nation of Grand Bruan.  Eddie’s friends know the tales of King Drake and his downfall and death at the hands of his bastard son Medraft, but now Eddie lets on that he was there during those final days.  And he’s willing to tell the tale.

Years ago, a simple spying job lands Eddie in the middle of Grand Bruan’s politics in a major way.  While Eddie’s at court, a Knight of the Double Tarn is killed with poison.  Worse, the poison seems to have been meant for the great knight Thomas Gilliam—and although it’s unthinkable, Queen Jennifer is implicated in the crime.

Now Eddie is forced to take part in the investigation surrounding the knight’s death and Jennifer’s involvement.  But the more he digs, the more he finds a court stuffed full of secrets.  And when the truth behind all the lies finally comes to light, it threatens to destroy the country that Marcus Drake built—the country that he intended would last forever.

One of the things that any brand of King Arthur tale must do is get past the fact that the outcome is well known.  Everybody knows that Arthur and Mordred die and England is plunged into chaos.  What makes the story fun is the variations on the details along the way.  Here, Bledsoe interjects a murder during the last days of Drake’s reign, and it allows Eddie to ferret out many of the court’s secrets during his investigation.

The author also uses this opportunity to put in details that turn many of the traditional story elements completely upside down.  The backstories of Drake and Elliot Spears (the Lancelot figure) have some key differences that change how readers view their characters.  The greatest change is bestowed upon Queen Jennifer (Guenevere).  There’s not much I can say that won’t spoil the tale, but I will say this: Bledsoe has managed to incorporate both the strong version of Guenevere and the weak version into his novel, and he does so with an unexpected but satisfying plot twist.

I also enjoyed the framing device of Eddie telling the story to an audience many years after the fact.  It allows Eddie to talk about how events related to each other as well as pointing out places that he slipped up or should have noticed clues.  It also adds the secondary mystery of who is in the coffin sitting outside of the tavern during the storytelling. 

The only minor hiccup in this novel, for me, was the occasional slip into anachronistic language.  I wasn’t expecting a lot of “thee” and “thou” from this novel—and indeed, I expected the language to be pretty down to earth with a mercenary main character—but every now and then the language sounded a shade too modern.  It didn’t detract from the story, but it did catch my attention a few times.

Overall, I found Dark Jenny to be an entertaining and highly readable novel.  A straightforward main character, a healthy dose of action, and some clever plot twists will satisfy any fan of Arthurian mythology.  This is Bledsoe’s third novel about Eddie LaCrosse, and I plan on picking up the first two books as soon as I can.

This book was provided by the publisher.