She may be, as a female, a pawn in some games, but she hopes at some point to gain her freedom by playing along skillfully. The special pawn of her nasty Uncle Henry ('she's more than a daughter to me,' he tells Carr), Frances has more political knowledge beneath her ruff than most of her male contemporaries will ever learn. Which is where, of course, the Flynn comparisons come from: Frances is a member of the powerful, ruthless Howard clan, people who will stop at nothing when it comes to gaining royal favor. However, the author allows her initially farcical version of Jacobean London to ease up as she speeds up the flip-flopping perspectives of Frances and Robert, signaled merely at each chapter's start by the words 'Her' and 'Him.' Despite the speed of their alternating perspectives, the two tell their stories slowly, using their present circumstances and past peccadilloes to heighten the tension about whodunit. Still, I wondered more than once if Fremantle really wanted to write erotica.)Īuthor Interviews Gillian Flynn's 'Sharp Objects' Is A Whodunit. ' There's a lot of musk released, many musky garments, tons of male pheromones flying fast and furious around the royal personage. certainly they contravened the law, but human desire can take many forms.

While he dreams of Frances, only Frances, King James is wetly kissing him and maneuvering him into yet another round of 'the acts we performed.

The much-older king paws constantly at his boy toy, who lets us know he's only ever felt lust for men before he sets eyes on the slender Frances, who could be a boy were it not for her Rapunzel-like hair. When they called Robert Carr 'the King's Favourite,' they weren't talking about his amazing intellect. There's also plenty of intrigue and sexy sex, with the intriguing difference that the sexiest sex is between men. Period detail abounds, from the bling-y golden ruffs that Frances's creepy cohort Anne Turner dyes with saffron, to the time it takes to bake a meat pie ('a good hour'), to the high value of an intact hymen amongst the upper classes. The Carrs were convicted in 1616 of murdering Sir Thomas Overbury, one of the many courtiers surrounding King James I. You'll immediately get the Burton connection with Fremantle's fifth book, which is based on a 16th-century true crime, the case of Frances and Robert Carr. When the press release for The Poison Bed by Elizabeth Fremantle called it ' Gone Girl meets The Miniaturist,' I took notice - because while I enjoyed Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, I flat-out loved Jessie Burton's 2014 debut The Miniaturist, which brought readers to a 16th-century Amsterdam as sugar-trade boomtown, a place few of us had ever considered. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Poison Bed Author Elizabeth Fremantle

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