Those Who Go By Night
A Novel
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- £12.99
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
A gruesome murder in a sleepy 14th-century English village sets the stage for a taut historical mystery laced with witchcraft, depravity, and long-buried secrets.
“A vividly told story of love, fear and the abuse of power.”
—Anne Perry, international bestselling author of the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt mysteries
England, 1324—a land rife with superstition and gripped by fear of the Church’s holy wrath. When a beggar is murdered in the quiet village of Bottesford, his body draped across the altar of St. Mary’s church in a perverse pose of pagan sacrifice, the Pope’s Inquisitor General places the small hamlet in his sights.
Anxious to stave off the Inquisition, the Bishop of Lincoln dispatches Thomas Lester, son of a disgraced Templar Knight, to investigate—but the Archbishop’s fanatical emissary has already arrived to conduct his own inquiry. Thomas’s investigation uncovers a viper’s nest of perfidious players: the secretive wife of the local lord, a notorious Irishwoman accused of witchcraft, and a depraved assassin who has left a trail of murder and blackmail in his wake. As this sordid drama unfolds, Thomas finds himself falling in love with a woman whose beauty is matched only by her defiance of the Church’s fearsome power.
Is the killer poised to strike again? Will the Inquisition bring its hammer down on the hapless hamlet? And could there be a real witch hiding in plain sight? The race is on to conjure the truth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in England in 1324, Gaddes's excellent debut focuses on a turf war between rival church factions, each with a stake in solving the murder of a beggar found draped across a church altar as if he were a pagan sacrifice in the village of Bottesford. At the insistence of the worldly Bishop of Lincoln, Thomas Lester, the talented son of a disgraced Templar knight, travels to Bottesford to investigate. Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a stalwart supporter of the pope, dispatches Father Justus, a Dominican friar, to conduct a separate inquiry. Thomas clashes with Justus, who's keen to uncover heretics in the village, and other cunning, often depraved opponents. Fortunately, Thomas discovers an ally in Alice Kyteler, a real-life "witch" of the period, who's not afraid to challenge church orthodoxy. The tension builds steadily, with plot twists coming thick and fast toward the end. Despite some graphic violence and the occasional jarring use of a modern word like uptight, fans of historical mysteries will find this a highly satisfying page-turner.