Brother Nothing

Paris, 1369. The plague has returned. Philippe Gautier flees the capital with his young daughter to return to the town of his birth. There, among the woad fields of Picardy, he hopes to keep Nicole safe and settle into a quiet post as the town’s royal provost, or dispenser of justice.

But pestilence is not the only danger. The wife of one of the town’s wealthiest merchants has been found murdered, strung up in the dyers’ quarter, dressed as an angel.

Philippe is tasked with bringing her killer to justice, but the town already has its culprit locked in the keep: a traveling player of miracle plays, who insists he is innocent of this crime but deserving of punishment for his many other transgressions. Now he means to make a full confession.

As Philippe is drawn into the prisoner’s tale of love and loss, of vanished children and decades-old corruption, he and Nicole find themselves at the center of a dangerous web of conspiracies and superstition. With the invading English army closing in outside the walls, Philippe begins to understand that the prisoner’s story and its mysteries have yet to reach their final act, and that he too must play a part.

A Gothic detective story, Brother Nothing is another brilliantly contemporary tale of the past, from a “remarkable” writer whose work “does not remain safely historical” (The New York Review of Books).