read full post >

In the twelfth century, the town and Abbey of Shrewsbury are caught up in the civil war between King Stephen and Empress Maud. Stephen's advisors have told him he's gone too easy on those who oppose him, so when the town of Shrewsbury falls Stephen decides to make an example of the 94 soldiers who guarded the citadel by hanging them from the castle walls. The Abbot asks the kind, thoughtful, level-headed Cadfael to take on the grisly task of preparing the hanged men for burial and cleaning them up so that the people of the town can claim any dead kinsmen. Cadfael, with his attention to detail, notices not only that there is one more body than expected, and that one of the men was strangled rather than hung. Cadfael uses his skill and knowledge to investigate this murder and figure out why and how this unknown young man ended up with the other 94 guards.

Read more...

read full post >

An intense, complicated book with a large cast of characters, and plenty of political maneuvering and betrayal. This is the kind of world where children who wander around the castle, climbing walls or trying to catch cats (as children do), are likely to see or hear something that could get them killed. The book is narrated in the third person, but each chapter follows the perspective or events around a different person, so the story starts with Eddard Stark and his family in the northern part of the kingdom, but the story ranges out as members of the Stark family travel, and as we get the stories and perspectives of other characters, such as Daenerys and Vyserys, the exiled children of House Targaryen, which formerly held the throne of the Seven Kingdoms.

Read more...

read full post >

In the 1970s, Cat Velis is a computer expert working with big-business clients until she gets sent to Algeria as a kind of punishment for not playing along with the boys' club and throwing a bid as she was asked to do. In 1790s France, Mireille and Valentine are two novices at the convent of Montglane Abbey. With the political unrest of the French Revolution, the Abbess decides she must unearth the mystical treasure that has been hidden at Montglane-- a chess set given to Charlemagne, that is, according to legend, incredibly valuable beyond the gold, silver, and jewels of the pieces themselves, but some secret equation encoded in the pieces and the board. The Abbess unearths them and scatters the pieces with nuns and novices sent out from Montglane, in order to keep the entire set from falling into the wrong hands. The stories in the two different time-lines proceed in parallel, and Cat discovers that she is caught up in something involving the same chess set that Mireille was, and that some of those pieces may be in Algeria.

Read more...