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The King's Hounds by Martin Jensen

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Rowan
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Posts: 1462
Joined: August 2008
Interest in HF: I love history, but it's boring in school. Historical fiction brings it alive for me.
Preferred HF: Iron-Age Britain, Roman Britain, Medieval Britain
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The King's Hounds by Martin Jensen

Post by Rowan » Tue February 18th, 2014, 7:42 pm

The newly crowned King Cnut of Denmark has conquered England and rules his new empire from Oxford. The year is 1018 and the war is finally over, but the unified kingdom is far from peaceful.

Halfdan’s mixed lineage—half Danish, half Saxon—has made him a pauper in the new kingdom. His father, his brother, and the land he should have inherited were all taken by the new king’s men. He lost everything to the war but his sense of humor. Once a proud nobleman, Halfdan now wanders the country aimlessly, powered only by his considerable charm and some petty theft. When he finds an unlikely ally in Winston, a former monk, he sees no reason not to accept his strange invitation to travel together to Oxford. Winston has been commissioned to paint a portrait of the king at the invitation of his new wife, and the protection of a clever man like Halfdan is well worth its price in wine and bread.

But when the pair’s arrival in court coincides with news of a murder, the king has a brilliant idea: Why not enlist the newly arrived womanizing half-Dane and the Saxon intellectual to defuse a politically explosive situation? The pair represents both sides of the conflict and seem to have crime-solving skills to boot. In their search for the killer, Halfdan and Winston find seduction, adventure, and scandal in the wild early days of Cnut’s rule.

~~~~~

This is one of the books I plucked off the Book Bub daily offerings as it's set in one of the periods of history I'm fond of reading about. While it features a handful of real historical figures - like Cnut and Godwin and Thorkel the Tall - they are more background figures as the two main characters, Halfdan and Winston, set about solving the crime.

I enjoyed the story for its simplicity and I think the summary above from Amazon is a little over the top (I'm being lazy today about writing my own). I didn't discover that the author is Danish until I saw on Amazon that a woman is listed as translator for the book.

This is apparently set to be a series, even though there are only two at the moment.

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