I have long loved the writing of Arthur Conan Doyle and, while the Sherlock Holmes canon will always be my favourite, he wrote very widely in several different genres, including one of my favourites, historical fiction. This one is set in France and French Canada in the late 17th century at the time when King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, the law enacted by his grandfather a century before extending tolerance towards the Huguenots (Protestants). Ten of thousands of these persecuted people fled to north America, the low countries, Germany and England. Amory de Catinat and his family are Huguenots, forced to flee, though he had recently earned high favour as a personal guard to the King. In addition to this personal story, the French half of the novel is dominated by the rivalry between Madame de Montespan, the long established mistress of the king and mother to his several illegitimate children, and her supplanter Madame de Maintenon, governess to those children. This is unintentionally funny in places and engagingly melodramatic in the best traditions of historical fiction written in the nineteenth century. King Louis XIV is famous for having said "L'etat, c'est moi", and this overwhelming domination is brought across well here. The French Canadian half of the novel I enjoyed less, and it got a bit repetitive with the endless battles with the Iroquois native Americans (hence dropping half a point), but there was a lot of drama and tension, while the violence and killings were vividly and quite horribly described (the Iroquois being portrayed, with the racial assumptions of the time, as simple savage brutes). This was a very well written and interesting novel about a period of history not generally well known to the great majority of British readers. ( )

I had only previously read Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, and was curious to see what his other work would be like. I was not expecting historical fiction set in the court of Louis XIV! Nonetheless, the book was enjoyable, in a rather melodramatic sort of way, and I would read other of his works that were not part of the Sherlock Holmes canon. That said, from what I have seen so far, his crime writing is his best work. ( )