Readability Review No. 5: Rizzio, by Denise Mina
Dread and despicability: What keeps me reading
READABILITY: Readers, Engaged
Book reviews that measure engagement with the book.
Today’s review covers my experience with Rizzio by Denise Mina, a 2021 novella centered on the night of the assassination of David Rizzio, private secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1566.
Welcome! Readability is a special department of The Book Case, reviewing how engaging books can be, from first glance to the final page. I want to explore the book as object and the book as experience.
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Readability Review:
Rizzio, by Denise Rizzio
Contemptibility and fear as bed partners
What I Read: Rizzio
Author: Denise Mina
Book type: Print
Bought or borrowed? Borrowed
Provenance: Passing the stacks on the way out of the local library, I slowed. I knew I had too much reading to do already — 65 student reports to grade, a manuscript to edit, and a book club selection — so I told myself to ignore the shelves of books. Walk on, Dinah… But what’s that? A yellow spine caught my eye. The sans serif typeface was bold and simple. It’s slim, I thought. Surely I can read a book this short? I picked it up to find out more and took it home a minute later.
What the cover tells us: The book centres on the night of the murder of a man named Rizzio: “On the evening of March 9th, 1566, David Rizzio, the private secretary of Mary, Queen of Scots, was brutally murdered. Dragged from the chamber of the heavily pregnant Mary, Rizzio was stabbed fifty-six times by a part of assassins.” How brutal, I thought, and read further. This book promised to explore events '“through a modern lens,” focused on “the lengths that men and women will go to in their search for love and power.” Murder, love, power: What a promise!
The book’s promise:
Quality writing - The book reviews on the back cover featured excerpts from starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly and Booklist, where there was much adulation for Denise Mina, calling her “Britain’s finest living crime novelist” (The Daily Telegraph), “a close observer of brutality” (New York Times), and “the cream of the crop” (Ian Rankin). I love crime fiction, but I hadn’t yet read any of Mina’s novels. Turning to the author’s bio, I saw that she is someone I’d love to know more about: a bestselling author and authority on crime fiction.
Scottish history - History never captured my attention in school, but I love the fictional storytelling of it. I like to participate in the imagining of history, where I can meet people of the past and feel I am part of the setting and time. Scottish history is compelling because its major events are so tied to ancient loyalties and lineages — something we Canadian-born readers don’t necessarily understand, being from such a young country — and it asks us to imagine our own response in the face of threats to our identity and freedom. So, seeing that this book would take me into this world again, my interest was piqued.
A short book - At 120 pages, this book is small. The chapters are short. I can fit this into my week.
Readability qualities:
Despicable We - This book is three years old, but I read it on the heels of the 2024 U.S. election, where power and ambition were the leading forces, not moral compasses. Post-election, many people were questioning allegiance. Many of the characters in Rizzio are despicable, power-hungry men, and they act out of the worst of human emotions. When faced with the choice to join the coup and the murder of Rizzio, they line up. Literally. With daggers. Lord Darnley, the husband of the Queen, is pathetic, worse for being so pliable, vascillating towards the ones holding the most power. It’s the worst of humans, and we see it every day, even now, in world events. We know — we know — this isn’t a story of the past. There is truth to be had here. It’s not pretty, but it’s true.
Tension and dread - There is no mystery here. It’s history, after all. Type “Rizzio” into Google and you have the story in moments. But Mina is a master of scene, and while we sit in dread of what will come, we stay riveted. There are moments of choice for these characters, and we watch because we want to know what they will choose when the moment comes to act. Who will act with integrity, who will succumb to the temptations of power and allegiance? There are hints of what is to come, offering us hope, but still, good may not win over evil. A few times, I wanted to pick up my phone, go online, and find out what happened next, but I stayed with the text. I trusted Mina to get me there, to tell me what happened. I enjoyed the dread.
Interplay between content and design - This book was a quick read, as promised by the length, but I want to remark on my engagement of the book as book. It’s easy to stay in the reading. The chapters are short, and the pages have a lot of white space. The lines of the text have wide leading (picture 1.5 line spacing in your Word document). It felt welcoming, accessible, breathable, completely in contrast to the claustrophobic, complex setting, the brutality of the crime, and the awful failings of the humans described in these pages. It suggests optimism. The writer — with perhaps the aid of an expert editor? — avoids heavy-handedness in punctuation, and we read forward with ease; the storytelling is rhythmic, and Mina plays with grammar conventions to effect. I enjoyed the reading experience, got caught up in it, despite my repulsion to the events of the story.
Verdict: Although I could have easily read this in one setting, I so thoroughly loved the sensations of dread and disgust that I rationed it, reading it in chapters, one a day, so it would last longer. The design of the book contrasts elegantly with the dark elements of the story. Don’t let the simple, unillustrated cover dissuade you from opening this book. Take the yellow cover as a warning: yield to the lessons of the past that tell us of the power-hungry and their yearnings. Be assured, however, that — somehow — hope remains alive, especially in Denise Mina’s capable storytelling hands. She is like Jean, Countess of Argyll, who rescues the sputtering candle and holds it aloft so we can see the crimes unfold.
Reader engagement rating: 5 out of 5
This is for you if:
You can’t look away. Are you someone who, when you see something terrible, you keep watching? That’s this story. It’s riveting.
You love slices of history. Rizzio, for the most part, covers one day in 1566, and yet it speaks to earlier human history and what comes after.
You like to be led by a capable writer through the story to the other side, even if the path is dark.
Sample it:
From page 28, when Mary, Queen of Scots realizes her husband is entangled in the night’s events:
And Darnley, caught red-handed, declares to the Queen and the company: ‘I have no idea how he got in. I don’t know what is going on or who else is involved.’
And then she feels his fingertips press viciously into the wall of her uterus.
If you want to read it:
Book title: Rizzio
Author: Denise Mina
Publisher: Pegasus Crime Date: 2021 ISBN: 978-1-64313-845-9
Buy it: Bookshop.org • Amazon • Indigo
Borrow it: Look for it in a library near you
Final notes:
Rizzio is one of five books in the Darkland Tales series by Pegasus Crime, all focused on moments in Scottish history, and written by recognizable authors like Val McDermid and Alan Warner. See them all here.
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Do you want to submit your own Readability Review? Submit your name, email address, and book title using this contact form. I’ll send you a list of questions to answer and I’ll prepare your review for publication. For each submission I publish, I will contribute $25 to a charitable organization in my community.
Coming soon in The Book Case
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Thank you for reading.
