River of Sins
1144, Worcester. A woman is found brutally murdered on an island in the middle of a river, a few miles from town. Hawkswood’s medieval crime-fighting duo Bradecote and Catchpoll, back for their seventh adventure, need to find out why she was murdered in this remote spot in order to find her killer. As they delve deeper into the victim’s past, they find that the clue to her murder lies in another death in that lonely place: that of her mother, twenty years ago. And as other women start to die in the town itself, the Sheriff’s men are in a race against time to find the murderer before he strikes again.
Although part of a series, River of Sins holds up entirely as a standalone historical whodunit. Hawkswood skilfully evokes a sense of the medieval world, one which is both far-off and familiar: bustling Worcester, full of craftsmen and traders, petty bureaucrats playing at local politics and families trying to get by, and the entirely different, but related world of the countryside, where secrets can be buried but not forgotten within small, tight-knit communities. The medieval detectives wind their way through a series of twists, turns and contradictory evidence to unpick the truth. The central characters, Undersheriff Bradecote and Sergeant Catchpoll, are a pleasing pair, a riff on the “suave, senior officer and the gruff, diamond-in-the-rough Sergeant” motif that is rightly popular in both historical and contemporary crime novels. They are joined by an eager, wet-behind-the ears-sidekick, young Walkelin, whose local gossip and enthusiasm is central to solving the case. But despite these familiar tropes, they are all well-rounded, empathetic characters in their own right, and the quality of Hawkswood’s writing makes this a highly entertaining mystery.
