Having quite enjoyed book 1 in this series I decided to read book 2. However, it doesn't quite hold up to the level of the first which had a few niggles in any case.

In this, the 'hero' has been unable to find his family as they had left their home before he could return and he has sunken into drunken depression. He is rescued by Cromwell's spy who takes him to Cromwell - they have another mission for him. This time it is to find the abducted sister of John Milton, better known in his own time for his pro-Parliamentarian firebrand writings than for the epic poems for which we remember him. The suspicion is that Royalists are behind the abduction but instead it turns out to be connected with events a few years previously when the sister's husband was supposedly lost in a battle.

Kate, the character I liked in book one, makes a reappearance now working as an archivist for Cromwell, trying to put together information on the whereabouts and fate of soldiers in the Parliamentarian armies. Therefore she is of help to the hero both in his quest for Milton's sister and his own personal search for his family. There is a hint of a thwarted romance on both sides with the awareness of his bond to his wife, as there was in book 1.

Somehow I found the situation less involving possibly because the action moves from place to place and there are a lot of different villains to dissipate the tension. It was an OK read, so 2 stars, but I'm not now drawn to looking for a third book if one exists. ( )

William Falkland is in a bad place. Having lost the trail of his missing wife and daughter he gets into a fight at an inn in Uxbridge and is thrown into jail. Yet again though Cromwell has need of Falkland and sends his man Warbeck to rescue Falkland from his fate. John Milton, the famous polemist, is concerned that his sister has gone missing and Falkland is taken with finding her. However some parties don't want her found and Falkland finds himself at the centre of warring factions at a time when an end to the Civil War is in sight.

Having enjoyed the first book about William Falkland, The Royalist, I looked forward to reading this one and I wasn't disappointed. The unpleasantness of life for the poor is described with real sympathy but brutal realism. The plot is a little complicated and not really resolved as clearly as it could be, the book feels a little porridgy towards the middle but the last hundred pages skip by with a lot of action. In setting his novels during the Civil War, Deas is creating a furrow of his own in terms of 'historical detective' novels and both parts of the genre - background and plot - are both solid and interesting. ( )