A Murderous Procession ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Read by Jill Tanner
10 discs
Medieval forensic pathologist Adelia Aguilar has been an enjoying a quiet life in the countryside with her daughter and friends. Then Henry II demands that she accompany his daughter, Joan, and her formal procession to Italy and offers to keep her daughter with Queen Eleanor until her safe return. But death stalks the procession, and Adelia and her loyal friends soon realize that the killer is someone from her past bent on revenge. -Booklist
Kate is married at a young age to an older merchant and becomes wealthy when her husband dies. Her second marriage is to a cousin who prefers the stableboy to his wife. She meets Richard of Gloucester and falls in love. Her husband is killed during an attack and she bears Richard three children.
Unmarried middle-aged Bette, plots the destruction of her cousin Adeline and her husband Baron Hector Hulot. Harboring a deep resentment of her relatives’ success Bette conspires with Valérie Marneffe, an unhappily married young lady, in the seduction and torment of a series of men. In the end Baron Hulot sacrifices his family’s fortune and good name to please Valérie, who then leaves him for a tradesman named Crevel.
Victoria was a stubborn, hot tempered monarch who ruled with many quirks and contradictions. Her childhood was a sad, lonely affair, stifled by her overbearing mother. An affectionate, strong-willed girl, she had to develop inner resources to survive. Inheriting the throne at age 18, Victoria represented a new age to subjects thoroughly tired of her dissolute uncles and Regency excesses. She married her cousin, Albert, and they poured their considerable energies into raising a large family and running England. Following his death, and through the cataclysmic changes of the century, Victoria ruled steadily, personal strength carrying her through crisis after crisis. Her strong and weak personality traits are sympathetically discussed and the opinions of her contemporaries give a balanced views of the queen.
Sexually frustrated, socially snubbed and parsimoniously financed, Princess Caroline, an uneducated bride from Brunswick, lapsed into reckless and disreputable conduct in the court of her father in law King George III. It was of little consequence that her husband the foppish future George IV was already illegally wed to a Roman Catholic widow, Maria Fitzherbert, she was still seen as a depraved woman for her many affairs. Meanness incarnate, Prince George tried for two decades and more to shed her, even after their only child, Charlotte, died in childbirth, leaving no heirs except George’s dissolute brothers, none of whom had legal children. The suit for divorce played out in Parliament making the couple’s relationship a sensation for england’s society.
The story opens with Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia manipulating papal elections in 1492 to become the new Pope Alexander. Determined to establish a family dynasty, he appoints his son Cesare cardinal in his stead and, after a strategically engineered episode of incest between siblings Cesare and Lucrezia, begins ruthlessly eliminating rivals and marrying his children into alliances with the offspring of noble families of France and Spain. But Cesare would rather be a soldier, and Lucrezia would rather marry for love; these conflicted desires contribute as much as risky political power plays to undoing the Borgias in a single generation. The narrative whizzes methodically through highlights of the Renaissance, embellishing events with cameos by Machiavelli, Michelangelo and da Vinci.
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