The Godless

Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner of London, needs Brother Athelstan’s help in Doherty’s outstanding 19th historical featuring the Dominican parish priest (after 2017’s The Mansions of Murder). In 1381, someone has been slashing the throats of prostitutes, stripping their corpses, and adorning their heads with a red wig before leaving the bodies in a skiff on the Thames. While some believe the red wig symbolizes the victims’ profession, Athelstan and Cranston think it’s connected with events from 1363 when a masked figure known as the Oriflamme, who dressed in women’s clothing and wore a red wig, led a company of Englishmen who plundered the French countryside and abused their female victims before killing them. The stakes rise when a royal ship, which was supposed to deliver treasure to the English garrison in Calais, instead explodes in the Thames. The sole survivor, the ship’s master, claims to have seen the Oriflamme on board. Doherty keeps the action brisk, the crimes baffling, and the deductions and solution fair. (Apr.)