Reviews in Print:
In the aftermath of so much death and destruction, postrevolutionary Paris struggles to recover, but people are poor, food is scarce, and freelance police investigator Aristide Ravel (Game of Patience) finds work where he can. At the house of wealthy Martin Dupont, Ravel must sort out the reason someone poisoned the family dinner, an act that led to Monsieur Dupont's demise. The Duponts all have reasons to hate the senior Dupont, but the police have arrested illiterate servant girl Jeannette Moineau in the face of what appears to be overwhelming evidence of her guilt. Alleyn skillfully depicts her characters' flaws and strengths while plotting a fine puzzle mystery. If your patrons enjoy historicals and have not yet discovered Alleyn, put her latest on the must-read list.
-- Library Journal (starred review)
Treasury is also on LJ's list of the best genre fiction of 2007.
Library Journal: Best Books 2007:
After the family patriarch is poisoned, freelance police inspector Aristide Ravel delves into the secrets of the wealthy Duponts in postrevolutionary Paris. This fine puzzler is enriched by undercurrents of impending danger and Alleyn’s attention to historical detail. (LJ 3/1/07)
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In Republican-era Paris, Aristide Ravel is a police investigator currently assisting in a case that involves the death of the elderly but healthy head of a bourgeois household. Although a young scullery maid has been charged with poisoning him, Ravel quickly discerns the greater likelihood that another household member would be a more probable culprit—and there are several suspects from whom to choose. The man's second wife, who is younger than his son, and his son also live in the house. He is an actor (a dubious profession even after the Revolution) and father to a teenage boy and a precocious 12-year-old girl. His sisters make their home there as well, including one who was a nun, before the convents were closed. Finally, there is the victim's daughter-in-law, who first called police attention to the scullery maid's unlikely role as murderer. Alleyn brings the period to life through nomenclature (the Republican 10-day week, for example) and a tidy subplot involving a deceased friend from Ravel's past. This is an excellent choice for mystery fans and for supplemental reading that supports both history and French culture curricula.
-- School Library Journal
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As the French Revolution comes to an end, a wealthy patriarch perishes along with it. The atmosphere in Paris in the spring of 1797 is gloomy. Struggling in the aftermath of the Revolution, freelance investigator Aristide Ravel (Game of Patience, 2006) still has nightmares of executed colleagues. At the local police station, where he trolls for work, Aristide becomes curious about the death of elderly Martin Dupont. The surgeon, Citizen Hebert, rules that Dupont died from tainted food. His son-in-law [sic] Laurence points out that everyone who ate that same food became sick. But Dupont's daughter Magdeleine cries murder and accuses the new cook, Jeannette Moineau, who's promptly arrested. Witnessing this police-station wrangling, Aristide sees Jeannette as an innocent pawn in a complex family battle and helps convince his friend Commissaire Brasseur to investigate further. There's no lack of motive or of colorful subplots among the substantial list of suspects, which Brasseur and Aristide proceed through methodically. Dupont's second wife, Ursule (his first died at a young age), was having an affair with dashing servant Jullien, but claims this was part of her arrangement with her much-older husband. Dupont's other son, Gervais, is a volatile actor with a history of irrational behavior. And no one doubts cold-blooded Magdeleine's capacity to kill. Alleyn's historical authenticity--extending to a bibliography, glossary and other explanatory features--lifts her competent and conventional whodunit above the ordinary.
-- Kirkus Reviews
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Two points pertinent to this novel cannot be argued against: mystery novels set in the historical past are in vogue, and historical novels set in the closing years of France's ancien regime and during the Revolution are equally so. This author's newest installment in her mystery series taps again into both hot genres. She takes as her sleuth one Aristide Ravel, who is an unofficial investigator for the police department, enjoying a "modestly profitable career" helping to solve crimes--other people would call him, and do call him, an informer. That the reader is in the hands of an author interested in immaculate historical detail and accuracy is evidenced from page 1, which starts on the sixteenth of Ventose, a month in France's new revolutionary calendar. The police have taken into custody a young servant girl accused by the family who employs her of poisoning the family patriarch. Determining her guilt or innocence is the objective in this traditionally plotted and atmospheric whodunit.
-- Booklist
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When investigator Aristide Ravel enters the office of his local police commissariat, he's met by Laurence Dupont, a young woman determined to clear the name of a family servant. Jeannette Moineau has been arrested on charges of feeding her bourgeois employers poisoned food--fatally, in the case of the family patriarch, the miserly moneylender Martin Dupont. Ravel's ensuing investigation, conducted in the tense, economically troubled atmosphere of 1797 Paris, turns up no shortage of suspects--and a surprising link between Ravel and Laurence.
A Treasury of Regrets combines the best in history and mystery. Rather than treating revolutionary Paris simply as window-dressing, Alleyn makes good use of the historical setting, both in creating her plot and in creating her characters, several of whom have lost loved ones to the guillotine. The mystery itself is artfully plotted and compelling; I was in due suspense as to whodunit.
This is Alleyn's second mystery featuring Ravel, though it's not necessary to have read the previous book, Game of Patience, to enjoy A Treasury of Regrets.
-- The Historical Novels Review
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The chaotic days following the French Revolution form the backdrop for this absorbing sequel to 2006's Game of Patience, Alleyn's third novel, in which police spy Aristide Ravel and Commissaire Brasseur explore the various motives and opportunities of the Dupont family after their patriarch is poisoned. The late Monsieur Dupont's widowed daughter-in-law enlists the two Paris policemen when the family's servant girl, Jeannette Moineau, is accused of the poisoning—a charge Mademoiselle Dupont considers absurd. The investigation moves forward, but another death soon follows. With a light, literate hand, Alleyn includes a wealth of detail about life in France during the Republican period, while ratcheting up the tension with every chapter. Fans of Charles O'Brien (Mute Witness) and Baroness Orczy (The Scarlet Pimpernel) will be delighted.
-- Publishers Weekly
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The arrest of a Paris kitchen maid, for the poisoning of wealthy Martin Dupont, owner of the house where she works, is the simple yet effective introduction to Susanne Alleyn's A Treasury of Regrets, an 18th-century mystery embellished by the drama of France's tumultuous post-revolution years. In a society still shadowed by the guillotine and haunted by its victims, mundane crime and punishment remain an issue.
Aristide Ravel is cast as a forerunner of the 20th century's laconic and lachrymose detective, a freelance investigator for the Paris police who finds that the poisoning of Dupont is rooted in a family's resentment and revenge, complicated by an intricate mesh of relationships upstairs and downstairs.
Ms. Alleyn skillfully portrays a household of suspects where crimes multiply while the unfortunate and innocent servant girl lies in a squalid jail cell. In the course of an investigation that takes him into hidden and forbidden corners of Parisian society, Ravel has to cope with revelations of his own past, and he is forced to relive the horror of the days when thousands of heads fell to the guillotine.
The author captures the atmosphere of a nation struggling toward a social and political unity untainted by the irrational violence and cruelty of those who toppled the monarchy. Ravel is a realistic and appealing observer of a developing society.
-- The Washington Times
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