The Book of Shadows

It is summer 1471, and devout pilgrims are heading for Canterbury to pray before the bones of St. Thomas a Becket. In this brisk, sharply-etched and often startling mystery (the fourth in the series featuring Kathryn Swinbrooke, physician), the pious travelers are accompanied by tradesmen, beggars, mountebanks and, again, a murderer. Tenebrae, the thoroughly evil warlock, has been killed. No one, from his unsavory servants to the Queen, regrets his death. But his volume of The Book of Shadows, which dates from Roman times and holds secrets of magic-and damaging information invaluable to blackmailers-has been stolen. Kathryn (last seen in The Merchant of Death), a leech and apothecary who cares for the ill only with a mixture of compassion, common sense and her own potions, is also licensed by the city to investigate questionable deaths. Bolstered by influential friends Colum Murtagh (the King's Commissioner) and Simon Luberon (clerk to the Archbishop of Canterbury), she zeroes in on an apparently respectable guild of goldsmiths who had had appointments with Tenebrae on the morning of his death. The ensuing investigation is swift and penetrating. Played out against the vibrant and gritty life of 15th-century Canterbury, it yields a tale that is as focused as it is shocking. (June)