The Devil’s Monk
Sara Fraser. Severn, $28.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-7278-8502-9
Superstition clashes with reality in Fraser’s workmanlike sixth mystery featuring Constable Thomas Potts (after 2013’s Til Death Do Us Part). When a pregnant female corpse battered beyond recognition and wearing male garb is discovered near a Worcestershire haystack in the summer of 1829, locals blame the ghost of a medieval reprobate known as the Devil’s Monk. The investigation offers welcome distraction for Potts, whose wife, traumatized by a recent miscarriage, has decamped for parts unknown. After the hatchet murder of an elderly man who had information about the first crime, Potts suspects farmworker Jared Styler, a violent womanizer. Dialogue tags contain too many adverbs, and neither the resolution of the marital crisis nor the conclusion of the mystery fully convinces. But a winning new character appears in George Maffey, a military veteran reduced to legalized begging, and the accurate depiction of an oft-romanticized period will appeal to lovers of British history. Fraser is the pen name of Roy Clews, a one-time Marine commando and Foreign Legionnaire. (Aug.)
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Reviewed on: 06/15/2015
Genre: Fiction