In 1861 Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, lay dying, supposedly of typhoid. This fact allows Stephanie Barron in her novel, “A Flaw in the Blood,” to start a mystery that explains, perhaps, why some of Queen Victoria’s male descendants had hemophilia and why Prince Albert died.

Victoria Regina summons an Irish barrister to Windsor Palace to sign a paper stating that allegations he made 20 years ago against the royal family were “nothing more than a fabrication of [his] own treacherous Irish mind.” Patrick Fitzgerald refuses, and the plot unfolds.

Shortly after Fitzgerald’s refusal to sign the document, there is an attempt on his life and the life of his ward, Georgiana Armistead. Georgiana is a rarity in Victorian society, a woman who has trained to be a doctor. Fitzgerald is in love with her even though he is her guardian, and his love, hidden from her, conflicts with her wish to help anyone who needs medical attention, including the poor who live where no proper lady should go.

The chapters regarding the escapes of Fitzgerald and his ward from one murder attempt after another are contrasted with diary entries written, supposedly, by Victoria herself. As we follow Patrick and Georgiana across London, into the Kent wetlands, where Fitzgerald’s wife lives, suffering from a hideous disease, to Cannes and then to Germany, where Albert had come from, we learn that Victoria is not the sweet, suffering, innocent monarch of tradition.

Victoria Regina will do anything, repeat, anything, to stay on the throne. The queen is delightfully amoral in how she treats her children, completely ruthless in her attacks on Fitzgerald, and sinister as to her motives. It’s a good read.



Around 1881, Tombstone, Arizona, was a wild, reckless place. The newly discovered silver mines have unleashed passions and dark forces over control of the town.

We know Tombstone as the place where the legend of Wyatt Earp started. Tradition says he and his brothers fought the Clantons in a famous gunfight at the OK Corral and cleaned up the town.

What if Earp was not a clean, well-mannered marshal with a long-barreled pistol but a necromancer, a sorcerer, who could feel where the silver and water were under the ground, and he was in a fight with other magicians to control the land rights.

Into Tombstone comes Jesse Fox, a drifter, but one who can also feel the power of the land. He meets Mildred Benjamin, a widow, who supports herself by typesetting at the “Epitaph” and writes western romance novels on the side.

All of this is in the novel, “Territory,” by Emma Bull. Bull artfully sets her scene as a Western novel long before any magic is used. We experience Western life as it might have been, harsh in the omnipresent sun, sudden as a fire in Tombstone, and lovely as the desert can be with a little water.

Gradually Earp’s sinister presence infects the surroundings as Fox tries to find the murderer of his friend, Chow Lung, a Chinese physician, and as he becomes involved with the Widow Benjamin. Together they fight the insidious Earp brothers in the attempt to control the underneath forces of the town.

Finally Fox is able to control Wyatt Earp magically for a moment and formally curse the erstwhile marshal so that he can only shoot someone he faces and not in the back as Earp had done so often before. This, of course, sets up the OK Corral gunfight in the coming sequel to “Territory.” I can hardly wait.



In 1921 Winston Churchill journeyed to Cairo to decide what to do with the leftover parts of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. He was joined there by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) and Gertrude Bell, the subject of “Desert Queen” by Janet Wallach. The three of them and some other Europeans then established the new countries of Jordan, Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.

The party took a trip to the pyramids during the negotiations and had their picture taken on camelback in front of the Sphinx. What if one of the people in the picture was an American woman who had traveled to Egypt on her own and had joined Churchill’s entourage because her missionary sister had once known Lawrence. This is the plot of “Dreamers of the Day” by Mary Doria Russell.

Russell has great fun imagining what it would be like for her American, Agnes Shanklin, to be there in Cairo while new countries are being created. Russell has done her homework, carefully explaining in a casual way why Israel came about, why Iraq should never have been put together, and why Hashemite kings were placed on people they did not know.

I was most fascinated with her interpretation of Lawrence, but her careful descriptions of all of the major characters seem authentic with all of their quirks. Unfortunately the book ends in an odd, mystical fashion, but as for an explanation of why we are still fighting in the Middle East, “Dreamers of the Day,” as a novel, is more entertaining than most.

Ralph Mohr taught English and Latin at Marshfield High School for 31 years. He welcomes comments and suggestions for the column at rmohr1565@charter.net.