Relics of the Dead

Adelia Aguilar has earned the title “Mistress of the Art of Death” in the service of King Henry II, for her expertise analyzing bones and other human remains. Her role is highly unusual for a 12th century woman, so she often pretends to be an assistant to her colleague Mansur, and the two communicate in Arabic. In this novel, Henry has sent Adelia to Glastonbury to investigate bones found after the Abbey was destroyed in a fire, which he believes may be those of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. She travels most of the way with her friend Emma, but after their paths diverge Emma disappears without a trace. Distraught, Adelia is committed to solving two mysteries. Throughout her investigation she gets herself into all kinds of show more trouble, adding suspense to a story rich with historic detail. There are enough plot twists to keep readers guessing all the way to the tale’s satisfying resolution. show less

I'm still enjoying this series. This was a very complex story but the writing carried me along.

Fleeing from her beloved fens to avoid being convicted as a heretic, Adelia is shortly summoned by the king to discover the truth about a set of skeletons unearthed in Glastonbury. Recently the scene of a devastating fire, the holy site has a chance of renewal thanks to the discovery of the supposed bones of Arthur and Guinevere.

Having had to put down a number of upstart Welsh rebellions lately, Henry II is very invested in showing his misbehaving subjects that King Arthur is in fact dead and will not be returning as Future King. Adelia is dismayed by these new orders as she knows of no scientific way to prove the age of a set of bones. However, when the king commands she has little choice in the matter.

Upon arriving at the ruins of show more Glastonbury, however, it soon becomes clear that there are any number of plots afoot. After the fire, something critical has changed - an evil has arrived and will need to be exorcised before the truth can be known.

Adelia will need all her wits if she is to outmaneuver the unknown parties who are once again seeking to kill her before she can uncover the secrets of the bones. In the meantime, she is having strange dreams which portend something grim and her friend Emma seems to have vanished from the face of the earth along with her young son.

These books just keep getting better and better! I thoroughly enjoyed this installment and can't wait to read the next. show less

If you are looking for a representative example of the historical murder mystery genre, well you might want to keep looking. You know, the book where someone is killed in the first chapter, the clues are gathered, the tension (and possibly the body count) rises until the murderer is caught in the last or second to last chapter, after which the detective explains the mystery, and then some secondary characters get to do something happy.

Don’t get me wrong, I quite like that book too, but if that is what you are looking for you are going to be frustrated by this one. The murderer is going to get revealed way too early, and there are going to be all these minor characters who wont stay in the background, the detective is going to make show more some foolish mistakes and get distracted by curiosity about things that don’t lead to uncovering the perpetrators… its just going to be odd.

So, enough about what this book isn’t. Now for what it is. It is about 40% mystery and 60% really good historical novel about the high middle ages, with a protagonist who struggles with how to be an educated woman outside of a nunnery (yes they did exist) and doesn’t always get it right. Personally I love it. I think this series is just getting better and better.

Also it contains paragraphs like this one, which I find truly wonderful;
Time resumed. There was warmth and the smell of wildflowers and above, a sky as blue as sailors’ trousers, the hum of bees, and –oh God how strange – the sound of plainsong coming from the ruins of a church where, unknowing, impervious holy men still celebrated the third hour of daylight, allowing the six note hexagons of their song to bring order back to a universe in which, for her, there had been chaos.


Nicely done Ms. Franklin, thank you for some really pleasurable hours of reading. show less

The book opens in 1154 as an earthquake engulfs Glastonbury Abbey and a dying monk sees people lowering a coffin into a fissure created in the earth. Did the coffin contain the body of the legendary King Arthur, long-thought to be merely sleeping in the nearby hills until his people need him again? Twenty-two years later the monk’s nephew, who was present as his uncle died, shares the information with King Henry II who has just quashed one Welsh rebellion and is desperate to rid himself of the legend of Arthur lying in wait to rise again. There has been a fire at Glastonbury Abbey and Henry orders the coffin to be dug up. He then commands the one person in his kingdom who has the skills to authenticate the bones as Arthur’s. Adelia show more Aguilar, the doctor who can ‘read bones’, reluctantly agrees to attempt to determine the age of the bones. With her daughter and faithful attendants she travels to Glastonbury, travelling part of the way with Lady Emma Wolvercote and her party who are on their way to lay claim to Lady Emma’s estate. Later, Adelia discovers she did not make it to her destination. Or did she?

As with the previous two books in this series, Relics of the Dead is first and foremost a good old-fashioned adventure full of brave Knights performing feats of derring-do while less noble souls engage in more prosaic acts. The legend of Arthur and Guinevere is woven artfully into the story unfolding around Adelia in the present day and there’s barely a moment for the reader to catch her breath with several action-packed threads playing out at once.

All of this is accompanied by engrossing information about the historical period, so you feel like you’re learning something while being thoroughly entertained. Under her real name (Diana Norman) Franklin has researched and written extensively about Henry II and her affection for the man is evident in this book. His faults are talked about, but Franklin generally tends to highlight his foresight and modern thinking by introducing such things as trial-by-jury and other innovations. Having read three of these books now, I’m beginning to develop my own crush on Henry Plantagenet.

Although some people argue that Adelia is an unbelievable character for her time, Franklin makes a a good case that women in her situation would have had more scope to fend for themselves than the true upper class women that Adelia sometimes mixes with. And even if she is not entirely credible for her time, she’s wonderful: strong, loving, loyal and smart. Her loyal attendants from the previous books, Mansur and Gyltha, are again excellent in their supporting roles and of course the Bishop of St Albans, the father of Adelia’s child, makes another trouble-filled appearance. There are some unforgettable new characters in this tale too, not least of which is the old woman who runs the Pilgrim’s Inn at which Adelia and her party stay while in Glastonbury. Franklin is a dab hand at developing very strong, memorable characters quite quickly.

Sadly Diana Norman passed away earlier this year and I have not heard of any unpublished manuscripts lying about so I only have one last book in this series to read, which I think I shall save for some time. I thoroughly recommend this installment of the series to anyone who loves getting absorbed in well-written adventures full of memorable characters. show less

I didn't realize this was third in a series when I picked it up. Series annoy me more the older I get. This book transcended my middle aged cynicism sufficiently that I already got the first one from the library. Which is just about the highest compliment I can give.

3rd in the Adelia Aguilar of Salerno series.

Adelia is in trouble. Even with the fiction of Mansour, her Saracen bodyguard, as a physician, the quacks of Cambridge are losing enough money to have both Mansour and Adelia hauled before a court on charges of heresy and possibly witchcraft. Prior Gregory, Adelia’s true friend, manages to convince Adelia, Mansour and the ever-loyal Gyltha along with 4 year old Allie to escape. They take refuge with Lady Emma Wolvercote, who made her first appearance in the second novel of the series, The Serpent’s Tale, and proceed with her on her way to Somerset, near Glastonbury, where she intends to claim her dead husband’s estate of Wolvercote for her 2 year old son, Phillip.

But on the way, they are show more met by a courier from Henry II, summoning Adelia to Henry, who is fighting the Welsh, who are firm in their belief that the legendary King Arthur is not dead but waiting to rise and rally the Welsh against foreign oppression. Henry wants to take advantage of a recent discovery at Glastonbury, site of the ancient Avalon, final resting place of Arthur according to legend. Two skeletons have been unearthed there; are they or are they not those of Arthur and his queen, Guinevere? Either way, Henry plans on taking advantage of the information; what he needs from Adelia, his clandestine forensic pathologist, is certainty, one way or the other. Adelia protests with the usual result. Adelia, Mansour, Allie and Gyltha set off for Glastonbury armed with Henry’s protection and, for once, some of that miser’s money.

That’s the start of an exciting pulse-pounding page-turning thriller that is the best yet in this series, surpassing Mistress of the Art of Death which is outstanding. Franklin has really outdone herself in plotting, with twists at every turn. She is adept at putting Adelia in credible life-threatening situations; this one is superb, so scary that I had to put the book down for a few minutes in order to break the tension. Franklin’s writing is outstanding. In her Author’s Note, she says she deliberately uses modern English because the characters would have sounded contemporaneous to one another--she acheives the same effect with modern, fairly formal English. The only exception is Gyltha, to whom she gives a Fenland accent. It all works perfectly.

Franklin even throws in sly humor, as in the passage where Adelia rails against ever arriving in England and discovering emotion, which she considers treacherous; the English, she says, bitterly, are too overwrought with emotion and she, Adelia, had been better off in rational, unemotional Sicily! Franklin, of course, is British, and her gentle dig brought to mind the Aubrey/Maturin books set during the Napoleonic Wars in which Stephen Maturin, an Irishman, notes disapprovingly time and again that the English are so prone to emotionalism, crying even forsooth!

The denouement is excellent, although part of it I suspected early on, but it doesn’t matter--the way Franklin arrives at her resolution is truly outstanding.

But unusually for Franklin, who surely knows how to write, the story carries on for a while, seeming to violate that edict that, after the climax, a writer should wrap up quickly.

Oh, don’t worry. There’s a reason.

Absolutely a must read for those who love to mix historical fiction with medieval mystery. I can not recommend this book highly enough. show less