Publisher's Weekly Review
Building on an actual murder in 1284, Doherty (The Death of a King auspiciously begins a mystery series featuring Hugh Corbett, clerk of the King's Bench. Lawrence Duket, goldsmith, kills Ralph Crepyn, moneylender, and flees to London's St. Mary Le Bow for sanctuary. The next day Duket is found hanged inside the locked church, an apparent suicide. Bishop Burnell, Chancellor for King Edward I, assigns Corbett to investigate. Burnell fears that the antiroyal Populares party will join with practitioners of devil worshipat this time, ``Christianity is only skin deep.'' Hugh Corbett is threatened and attacked while probing ``a suicide which was really murder which . . . masked treason, sorcery and rebellion.'' The santanist group seems to be centered at The Mitre, a tavern owned by the beautiful Alice atte Bowe, with whom Corbett falls in love. The mystery is neatly done and Doherty's ease of scholarship in giving us the rich sights, sounds and smells of medieval London is masterful. (March 24) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Doherty, author of a lively historical-crime reconstruction (The Death of a King, 1986), goes even further back in English history--to the reign of Edward I, circa 1284 A.D.--to begin a mystery series featuring Hugh Corbett, clerk in the Courts of King's Bench. In this so-so debut outing, Corbett is asked to investigate the ""suicide"" of goldsmith Lawrence Duket--which the King's top adviser believes to be connected to the treasonous doings of a secret London ""coven"" (following in the radical/Satanist footsteps of Simon de Montfort). Indeed, Corbett soon finds evidence that Duket's hanging at the church of St. Mary Le Bow was murder, not suicide. And just before being killed, it seems, Duket himself assassinated shadowy moneylender Crepyn, a villain with links to the coven. So Corbett endeavors to find out exactly how Duket died, and who the coven's leaders are--while falling hard for Crepyn's reputed mistress, beautiful innkeeper Alice. The trail leads to a male brothel, to near-fatal scuffles by the foggy Thames, to the Tower of London. But the unmaskings of the coven-mastermind and the spy in Chancery are totally unsurprising. And while 13th-century London is made sporadically vivid, with a few grisly sideshows, the stagy dialogue lacks period conviction and the characters remain one-dimensional. Still, if a cut below Ellis Peters and Leonard Tourney in the crucial areas of plotting, personalitY, and atmosphere, this is a sturdy addition to the English-historical-mystery shelf--with promise, perhaps, of richer adventures to come. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
