Much of the action in “The Wolves of Andover’’ alternates between Billerica, Mass., and England, with the central plot revolving around a group of men who have been hired by King Charles II to sail to Massachusetts and capture the men who killed Charles I (primarily Thomas Carrier in this instance).
Initially, it seems as though Kent is going to take a feminist approach with her latest work. Her protagonist, Martha Allen, is introduced as a 19-year-old unmarried woman who has already been written off as a spinster and is sent by her father to work as a servant in her pregnant cousin’s home in 1673. Martha, we’re told, wants children but has no desire for a husband — problematic in Colonial Massachusetts — but that changes when she meets Thomas Carrier, a hired worker of her cousin’s husband.
The central flaw of “The Wolves of Andover’’ is its misguided character development or lack thereof. The real Thomas Carrier, for instance, reportedly stood more than 7 feet tall, is suspected to have been the man who actually wielded the ax in the king’s execution, and lived to be 109 years old. It’s telling that these facts, taken in succession, paint a more intriguing picture of the man than Kent manages to do over the course of 300 pages.
The sexual tension between her two main characters is told rather than shown, and the reader doesn’t ever really get a sense of why these two people are attracted to each other. The writing is occasionally uneven, and the dialogue between the clandestine lovers at times comically melodramatic, with lines like “You are the deer shot through with arrows whose heart grows cold for want of being taken.’’ Unfortunately, it’s difficult to become emotionally invested in such a drowsy love story.
