The Lost Prophecies

Following on from The Tainted Relic, Sword of Shame, and House of Shadows, comes The Lost Prophecies, another series of tales by "The Medieval Murderers", this time woven around the theme of a book of prophecies penned by a "mad" Irish monk at the end of the 6th century.

Mad, maybe, but the prophecies have tended to come true, and the book, now known as the Black Book of Bran, has achieved a lurid reputation among those in the know – such as the Pope and his advisers. The Pope it seems has a copy stored safely in the Vatican (or Avignon or wherever) but the original keeps getting lost as each of its owners comes to a horrible end. In Act III, for instance (set in 1325), Brother Alexander of Westminster Abbey is flayed – literally skinned alive – and it falls to Sir Baldwin Furnshill and Simon Puttock (yes, them again!) to investigate the murder. These events in fact seem to take place while Baldwin and Simon are in London for their first adventure with Queen Isabella, as recorded in Dispensation of Death, and prior to their trip to France with her in The Templar, the Queen and her Lover (both stories reviewed on this site by me). Following this, the "accursed book" is hidden away once more.

But not for long.

A few years later, it resurfaces in Cambridge. And now it is Matthew Bartholomew who becomes involved in the subsequent deaths as college vies with college for its possession.

I must say though that it wasn't the stories set in the medieval period that I enjoyed so much as those that followed it. The Prologue by Bernard Knight is perfect, with its tale of the mysterious birth and miraculous death (or rather disappearance) of Bran, the author of the prophecies. But after that, the first story to really grab me was Philip Gooden's one set in the reign of James I, and featuring the player Nick Revill – and Will Shakespeare as a presence in the background. And there is C.J. Samson's story which moves right out of the HF genre and into futuristic SF. It is 2135, the ice-caps have melted, the sea has risen, everything has gone wrong and the population has shrunk from six billion to one hundred million. (That sounds a lot still, but it means 5,900,000,000 people have been wiped out.) And predicatably there is a Church preaching the End of the World – and seeking actively to bring it about, with a version of the Bible that has the Black Book of Bran tacked onto the end after the Book of Revelations. Naturally, there is a hero who tries to save the world, a young James Bond of Indian extraction called Shiva, and a James Bond girl also with Indian roots, and called – yes – Parvati. She is beautiful, of course, but is she a good James Bond girl or a bad James Bond girl? And does Shiva manage to save what is left of the world? Ah ha ...

C.J. Samson, by the way, is best known for his Matthew Shardlake books, set in the reign of Henry VIII, but he is also the author of Winter in Madrid, which I am reading now and going to review for our Non-Medieval page. Have a look, it is really, really good.

MBG