Saintly Murders (A medieval mystery featuring Kathryn Swinbrooke) [Hardcover]

When a Canterbury monk and the Queen Mother's confessor dies and is found with the stigmata on his body, Kathryn Swinbrooke is asked to serve as Devil's Advocate in his proposed canonization. Was his death a miracle, or could it be something worse?

Certainly there are evil things abroad. Rats have invaded Canterbury and human rats swarm as well. A spy returned from France has learned the name of the traitor but is killed before he can divulge the truth. Kathryn is forced to deal with several intertwined mysteries--and finds herself in grave personal risk.

C. L. Grace writes a wonderfully involving novel set in the fascinating War of the Roses period of English history. Kathryn is an interesting and well developed character--increasing the reader's buy-in to the risk and danger that she finds herself in.

Both the medical technology and the accounts of monestary living add to the readers' interest.

A fine and compelling read.

BooksForABuck.

SAINTLY MURDERS bears a passing resemblance to the Brother Caedfal mysteries of Ellis Peters. The central murder victim is a friar of the Order of the Sack, who also happens to be the confessor of Cecily of York, mother of Edward IV. Much of the action takes place on the grounds of the prosperous Order's establishment. Within days of his death, Friar Atwood is being put forward for sainthood because of miracles and mysterious occurrences at his burial site. The Archbishop of Canterbury appoints Kathrn Swinbrooke Advocatus Diaboli (the Devil's Advocate) to argue the case against Atwood's beatification. In the process she uncovers and solves murders and spy plots galore.

Loath though I am to question historical details provided by an Oxford-educated medievalist, Grace/Doherty's having Kathryn appointed Advocatus Diaboli so that she has the power to delve into the mystery of Friar Atwood's death smells extremely fishy. The first recorded mention of an Advocatus Diaboli was in 1513, 40 years after this story takes place, and the office was not formally established until 1587. Those who held the title were generally high churchmen, not apothecaries and certainly not women. My biggest difficulty, though, with SAINTLY MURDERS is not this dubious plot device but rather the way Kathryn exercises her power as Devil's Advocate. In general she behaves just like a brash 21st century female PI. She orders male characters about and threatens them as if she has been doing it all her life. She tells a church prelate to "shut up" and jibes the King's brother about his manhood. In his afterword, Grace/Doherty makes the argument that women "...probably had more rights in 1300 than they had in 1900..." and cites Chaucer's Wife of Bath as a woman who could hold her own with men. Perhaps, perhaps, but that does not mean that a woman of Kathryn's station in life would be accustomed to bossing and questioning, with such panache, men and women of higher social standing.

I find it odd that the Black Death and its aftermath figures not at all in SAINTLY MURDERS' backdrop of English life during a lull in the War of the Roses. The battle of Tewkesbury may have decimated the Lancastrian nobility, but the plague reduced the population of the British Isles by a third, a loss that took three centuries to recoup. The effects of declining food production caused by the plague and climatic change is nowhere visible. The expulsion of the English from their continental possessions is mentioned, but we aren't shown the diastrous reduction in trade that resulted from that loss. Grace/Doherty gives his readers a merry old England going about its business as usual, but that is not the real Britain of 1472.