Here is an historical novel with a difference, a reimagining of an old story and its hero, a king we knew from Sunday School, winner of a thousand battles, founder of an empire and a dynasty, beloved of his people and of his deity, King David of "David and Goliath" fame, as seen through eyes which the old biblical text tried mightily to conceal. In truth, though the David we have from the bible is the fair-haired child of the people of ancient Israel and their Lord, a careful reading of that tale reveals a very different man: a man who cleverly turns every situation to his advantage, who consistently says one thing but does another, who plays both sides of every conflict and who collects women as he does kingdoms. That we idolize this man today is a testimony to the spin his biblical handlers put on his tale. And to the fact we will forgive certain folks almost anything. In fact we seem to do that even today as recent political events have shown, forgiving some men the greatest excesses while yet condemning others for far less. I suppose it has to do with who we want to like and who we don't. Well, India Edghill has given us that other David, the one who lurks just below the surface for those of us willing to scrape away the heroic gloss and read the old tale for what it is. Edghill's is the story of David as seen through the eyes of Michal, the woman he made queen of his kingdom, much against her will, the daughter of his predecessor Saul, who David hounded out of his kingdom by cajolery and trickery and then had the tale turned on its head so posterity would remember David himself as the aggrieved party. It's not politically correct in the religious sense but it's the real story lying there, just below the surface. It's the story of David the soldier who betrayed his king and best friend, who dickered with and served their enemies, who took Michal against her will and installed her in his palace as a symbol of his right to rule from a usurped throne, who killed most of the surviving male members of her family and took one, a hopeless cripple, to live a prisoner at his court. A man who kept his word when the appearance of that suited him but who found ways to get around every obstacle his own words created when he needed to do that. No, this is not the David we remember from bible class. But it is the David which the biblical tales preserve. And Inda Edghill has dug him out. Hers is the tale of David as seen through Michal's eyes, the daughter of the usurped king, reluctant wife to a dazzling dissembler, watching as the great hero of his people turns every event to his advantage and claims divine support for each maneuver. The tale effectively evokes the "feel" of biblical times and Ms. Edghill has a remarkable sense of dialogue. Her words ring true and yet rarely sound too modern or inconsistent with the language of the original material. I did, however, miss a certain sense of the larger world around them but this was the result, no doubt, of the female point of view Ms Edghill used since Michal spends much of the story cooped up in one king's house or another, the lot of royal women in those days. And I was a trifle disappointed by the rather one-sided view of David which is offered. For all his clever self-interest, the beauty of the original biblical story is how human David seems to be, heroic yet manipulative, honorable yet not above self-interested violations of honor. Yes, the biblical tale subsumes all the bad stuff beneath the gloss of piety and good-heartedness and Ms. Edghill offers us a welcome antidote to this based on the actual events themselves. But I think she missed an opportunity to give us a more rounded picture of this man. If he wasn't the fair-haired hero of purest spirit which the biblical writers preserved for us, I suspect he also wasn't the totally unpleasant and false charmer Ms. Edghill gives us either. Her tale is a fine one, a woman's eye view of the Bill Clinton of his day. And yet I think she was not entirely fair to her David in the end for if he was not all good, as the biblical writers tried to make him out to be, he was probably not all bad either. But Ms. Edghill's tale, welcome as it is, loses that dimension of the man and gives us an image of a womanizing manipulator who gets good press despite ill-doings. But this is a small quibble in the end, for she has reimagined the David story in a way which resonates and enlarges the old tales, creating a novel of real heart out of some very old P.R. Read this one if you want to know how it probably was . . . in spite of the old scribes.