Warning: strpos(): Empty needle in /homepages/5/d845057890/htdocs/clickandbuilds/LionessatLarge/wp-content/plugins/regenerate-thumbnails-advanced/classes/Environment.php on line 47
Michael Jecks: The Butcher of St. Peter’s – Lioness at Large

Michael Jecks: The Butcher of St. Peter’s


Blurb:

Exeter, 1323. A strange man is entering people’s houses at night, causing panic amongst householders. Although many had thought him harmless, now he seems to have committed murder.

A man lies dead in his own home, slaughtered merely for trying to protect his children, and the folk of Exeter want this menace caught and hanged. Sir Baldwin de Furnshill suspects that the solution isn’t that simple.

As the country prepares for yet another civil war, two more people are found dead, and the city of Exeter shudders at the thought that there could be a killer out there, determined enough to strike again and again …

Another series I’m not reading in order, and I can’t say I regret it. Like in most of the series — particularly so its later books, of which this is one — Jecks does an absolutely knock-out job recreating the topography, visuals, smells and sounds of medieval Exeter, and giving us a story populated by characters who step right out of the book and before your eyes if you let them, without in the process coming across as anything other than what they are; namely, denizens of the early 14th century. All you really need to know, though, is that this, too, is a serial killer novel … and I don’t particularly like serial killer novels. So, chalk one up to Jecks for making me give a second book of that nature almost as high a rating as the Appointment with Agatha reread of Christie’s The A.B.C. Murders earlier this month.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Literature Reviews

Adventures in Arda

Note: This was my summer 2022 project — but while I posted the associated project pages here at the time (Middle-earth and its sub-project pages concerning the people and peoples, timeline, geography, etc. of Arda and Middle-earth, see enumeration under the Boromir meme, below), I never got around to also copying this introductory post from […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Michael J. Sullivan: Riyria

The Riyria Revelations are the fantasy series that brought Michael J. Sullivan instant recognition back in the late 2000s.  Originally published as a series of six installments, they are now available as a set of three books, with each of the three books comprising two volumes of the original format.  As he did with almost […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Michael J. Sullivan: Legends of the First Empire

Michael J. Sullivan’s Riyria books have been on my TBR for a while, but until I’d read two short stories from the cycle — The Jester and Professional Integrity — I hadn’t been sure whether his writing would be for me.  Then I found out that (much like Tolkien’s Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The History […]

Read More