The Magician’s Death: A Hugh Corbett Medieval Mystery

by: P.C. Doherty

Published by: Minotaur Books/ St. Martin's

Reviewed by Kathy Perschmann

This is the 14th in the Hugh Corbett series. Set at Corfe Castle in Dorset, in 1303, where Hugh Corbett, Keeper of the Secret Seal of King Edward I, arrives at the command of the King. Basically, Hugh is in charge of intelligence gathering for King Edward I of England, and is charged to host a conference of English and French experts to try to decipher the Secretus Secretorum, a book written in a strange code by the great man of science, Roger Bacon, who died in 1294 (famous for his research into gunpowder and optics, among other things) There are two copies extant–one in England and one in Paris. Hugh is one of the English scholars, due to his experience of ciphers, along with his clerks Ranulf and Bolingbroke.

All matter of strange doings are going on at the castle. For the past few months young women have been murdered by crossbows, and their bodies left scattered around the castle, village and forest. It all started with the disappearance of young Phillippa, daughter of the head washerwoman at the castle. By the time Hugh arrives, they are at victim number 7, and the grief stricken parents beg him to solve the crimes and stop the murders. Some blame a raggedy band of poachers and thieves living rough in the forest, led by Horehound, but after talking to them, Hugh is convinced they are innocent.

Shortly after the arrival of French delegation, the French professors start to die in unusual but seemingly natural circumstances, behind locked doors! Hugh suspects the local tavern keeper, and the priest in the village, who seems not quite right in his mass and priestly duties. He is almost certain that the French scholars were murdered by the leader of the delegation Amaury de Craon, sent especially on this mission by King Phillip IV of France.

There are a lot of odd happenings–pirates off the coast, strange Castillian wool merchants hanging out at the tavern, and attacks on Corbett himself. Will he ever be able to decipher what is going on, much less the secret book?

Doherty is a scholar of this period, and his detailed work brings the era and the characters alive, a tired cliché of a compliment, but true.

Armchair Interviews says: Full of history and place of the 1300, a most interesting 5-star historical mystery.

Author’s Web site: http://www.PaulCDoherty.com