Kate SEDLEY - The Holy Innocents

‘Your brother has kindly offered me the shelter of his roof for the night,’ I told Oliver Cozin, ‘but I shall be gone soon after daybreak. For reasons of my own, I shall be glad to leave Totnes.’

And I followed him across the inner courtyard, along the passage, out of the door, and shook the dust of that accursed house from my feet for the very last time.

A nefarious plot will go right to the heart of the most powerful seat in the land…

Roger the Chapman returns to London in the summer of 1475 for some badly needed rest and entertainment. But the hand of Fate interrupts his plans once again…

King Edward IV is readying his troops to invade France with a great show of strength, and though rumors abound that the king is reluctant, London is teeming with the energy of the march.

But as the campaign approaches, a spy infiltrates the household of the Duke of Gloucester, the king’s brother, leaving one dead in their wake. All information indicates that the spy is the tool of a conspiracy to assassinate the duke before the king’s invasion.

Motive and method, no one knows – only that the duke’s death is promised by the eve of Saint Hyacinth. Roger, who proved his loyalty to Gloucester in a case a few years ago, is the only one the duke trusts to uncover the traitor and the powers behind him.

Kate Sedley is the pen-name of Brenda Margaret Lilian Clarke (née Honeyman), an English historical novelist. She was born in Bristol in 1926 and educated at The Red Maids’ School, Westbury-on-Trym. She is married and has a son and a daughter, and three grandchildren. Her medieval historical whodunnits feature Roger the Chapman, who has given up a monk’s cell for the freedom of peddling his wares on the road.