This is the book that, chronologically speaking, immediatel precedes The Templar's Penance, where Sir Badwin Furnshill, the ex-Templar turned Keeper of the Kng's Peace, and his friend Bailiff Simon Puttock, go on pilgrimage to Spain. Reading the books in the wrong order, I never really understood why Sir Baldwin felt the need for this penance, but in The Mad Monk of Gidleigh, all becomes clear: towards the end of the book he personally kills with his sword a more or less defenceless, and completely innocent, man. All right, he believed the man to be a murderer about to commit a second murder; but he was wrong, and that, in Sir Bldwin's opinion, made him a murderer.
How did all this come about? A young monk/priest, lonely and cold in a hamlet on the edge of Dartmoor, gets a local girl pregnant. She is found murdered, and he is the obvious suspect - though it could as easily have been one of the local boys, who are all jealous of the "foreign" priest, for Mary was by far the most attractive girl in the area.
But there is more to this than meets the eye, for that young monk, Brother Mark, is the illegitimate son of Sir Ralph de Wonson, the Lord of the Manor, though Sir Ralph is unaware of this connection. A friend of the powerful Despenser family, Sir Ralph is a brutal womaniser and his son Esmon is worse than he is.
The master of nearby Gidleigh Castle is also murdered - poisoned with an overdose of his own medicine, henbane - and the castle passes into Sir Ralph's hands.
Is there any link between these two murders? Why has the death of the girl Mary affected Sir Ralph so deeply? Was she also his mistress? And where do the village idiot, Samson, whom Mary always used to defend, and the rather sinister local hermit, Surval, fit in? One or both of them may have been present at the time of the girl's death, may have witnessed the murder - may even have committed it. And then there is Mary's jealous sister Flora, and her obnoxious (and would-be incestuous) brother Ben. A vast array of suspects.
Sir Baldwin, in danger of his lfe and in need of help, sends for his friend Simon Puttock, but Simon does not come - the death of the girl is no concern of his - until yet another murder occurs: the victim this time is a tin-miner, and that is Simon's business.
In a village like this (and all the villages were more or less like this) where the Lord of the Manor, had power of life and death over the villagers, he could have any woman he fancied if he felt so inclined. And Sir Ralph had felt so inclined, as had his father before him, and as did his son now.
As usual with Michael Jecks' books, Mad Monk is quite hard to get into - so many different characters and so many different viewpoints in the first few chapters - but once you are into it, it is hard to put down: two nights running I went to bed at five o'clock, it is a long book, but it is one of his best. Read it.
JM
