A Friar's Bloodfeud

Exeter, 1323. A strange man is entering people’s houses at night, causing panic amongst householders. Although many had thought him harmless, now he seems to have committed murder. A man lies dead in his own home, slaughtered merely for trying to protect his children, and the folk of Exeter want this menace caught and hanged. Sir Baldwin de Furnshill suspects that the solution isn’t that simple. 

Forty years ago, Exeter's Cathedral Close was the scene of a vicious ambush. Afterwards, the bodies left lying in their blood bore witness to the conflicts tearing at the heart of the cathedral itself. Today, in 1323, murder is again polluting the Cathedral Close - but this killer is not so easily caught. The victim, Henry Potell, was feared and hated; he held secrets that some wished to keep hidden....

As the winter of 1323 descends upon a windswept chapel on the edge of Dartmoor, who could blame the young priest, Father Mark, for seeking affection from Mary, the miller's daughter? But when Mary, and her unborn child, are found dead, Mark is the obvious suspect. Called to investigate, Sir Baldwin de Furnshill and his friend Bailiff Simon Puttock soon begin to have their doubts. Could one of Mary's many admirers have murdered her in a fit of jealousy? Or might it be someone even closer to home?

1326: Queen Isabella refuses to leave France and humiliates her husband, King Edward II, by flaunting her adulterous relationship with the arch-traitor Sir Roger Mortimer. The King is furious when he hears she has also betrothed their son to the daughter of the French Count of Hainault, and all England fears invasion. As news of an invasion fleet is received, the King’s knights, including Sir Baldwin de Furnshill, are commanded to London to protect the King and his realm. 

When King Edward II is informed that his wife, Queen Isabella, has defied him and remained in France with their son, he flies into a rage. It is Sir Baldwin de Furnshill and his friend Bailiff Simon Puttock who have broken the news to him and are now no longer in the king’s favour. They return to their homes in Devon, but they find that outlaws hold sway in the land. Sir Robert, a knight from the King’s household, has turned outlaw from his castle near Crediton. When a pair of clerics are found murdered, Baldwin and Simon are asked to investigate. 

1325: in the gilded cage that is the Palace of Westminster, Isabella, Queen of England, is troubled by court intrigue. Her jealous husband, Edward II, has removed all her privileges, her regal status and even her children. When Isabella is dispatched to France to negotiate peace with the French King, Sir Baldwin de Furnshill travels with her to ensure her safety. But it seems that no one can be trusted, not least the queen’s own retinue. 

In 1360 Edward III issues a call to arms, as sporadic attacks by the French threaten to turn into a full-blown invasion. In Cambridge, fear of the enemy is magnified by the belief that foreign agents are lurking in the area. Tension runs ever higher as rumours and ignorance fan the flames of suspicion amid preparations for war. And then the first murder occurs - of a French scholar living in the town.

As the leading churchmen and women gather at the Synod of Whitby in AD 664 to debate the rival merits of the Celtic and Roman Churches, tempers begin to fray. Conspirators plot an assassination, while mysterious, violent death stalks the shadowy cloisters of the Abbey of St Hilda. When the Abbess Etain, a leading speaker for the Celtic Church, is found murdered, suspicion inevitably rests on the Roman faction. Attending the Synod is Fidelma, of the community of St Brigid of Kildare.

Baldwin Furnshill and Bailiff Simon Puttock have been granted leave to go on pilgrimage. Together they travel across Europe to Portugal, but danger seems to follow them, as they are among the first on the scene when a beautiful young girl is found brutally raped and murdered on the hillside of Santiago de Compostela. Baldwin and Simon lend their investigative skills to the ensuing enquiry headed by the local pesquisidore, Munio. 

London, 1591. Nicholas Shelby, physician and reluctant spy, returns to his old haunts on London's lawless Bankside. But when the queen's spymaster Robert Cecil asks him to investigate the dubious practices of a mysterious doctor from Switzerland, Nicholas is soon embroiled in a conspiracy that threatens not just the life of an innocent young patient but the overthrow of Queen Elizabeth herself. With fellow healer and mistress of the Jackdaw tavern Bianca Merton again at his side, Nicholas is drawn into a dangerous world of zealots, charlatans and fanatics.

When the mutilated body of midwife and healer Agatha Kyteler is discovered in a hedge one frozen wintry morning, it seems at first that a lack of clues will render the crime impossible to solve. Then a frightened local youth inexplicably flees his village, and a hue and cry is raised in his wake. Sir Baldwin Furnshill, once a Knight Templar, has doubts about the boy's guilt. He enlists his friend Simon Puttock, bailiff of Lydford Castle, in the hunt for a murderer.

Wighard, archbishop designate of Canterbury, has been discovered garrotted in his chambers in the Lateran Palace in Rome in the autumn of AD 664. The solution to this terrible crime appears simple as the palace guards have arrested Brother Ronan Ragallach, as he fled from Wighard's chamber. Although the Irish monk denies responsibility, Bishop Gelasius is convinced the crime is political and that Wighard was slain in pique at the triumph of the pro-Roman Anglo-Saxon clergy in their debate with the pro-Columba Irish clergy at Whitby. 

It's 1194, and Sir Faucon de Ramis, the shire's newly appointed keeper of the pleas, must do his duty and make an official declaration of the cause of a miller's death. Saddled with a clerk who names Faucon his "penance", the shire's first crowner must thread the tangled relationships between the sheriff, the village of Priors Holston, and the priory that once ruled it. As a simple task takes a turn to the political, what seems obvious isn't, and what appears safe turns out to be more dangerous than he could imagine. 

When a gruesome murder occurs in a sleepy 14th-century English town, Thomas Lester dives into an investigation that unearths witchcraft and long-kept secrets.

Cold-blooded murder has transformed Simon Puttock's official obligation into something horrid, and he will need the able assistance of his friend, Sir Baldwin Furnshill, to draw a criminal out. A former Knight Templar, Sir Baldwin knows much of duty and servitude and of evil freely indulged in the name of godliness or greed. Now, justice must be served, even if their search exposes extortion, foul corruption, rule by fear, and killers willing, even eager, to shed more blood.