Plague Land
This is a mediaeval murder/mystery which begins with a murder and ends with the murderer unmasked, but it is much more than a whodunnit. It is a complex story of a monk coming back into the world in 1350, two years after the Black Death, to find a country (specifically Kent) still traumatised by the catastrophe and struggling to rebuild family life and the local economy and make sense of what has happened. Oswald, the ex-monk and unexpected heir to the lordship of a Kentish village, tells the story in the first person. He does not share the villagers’ myths and terrors, but they do much to handicap his investigations. In following up two local murders, he discovers some disturbing family secrets that challenge his own identity and that of his closest friend. A beautifully told story of a shattered country in the aftermath of the worst catastrophe in its history.
