Three murders: one, the first, a multiple murder wreckers entice a ship in a storm onto a rocky coast and slaughter all those who make it ashore except one, who manages to escape them. The second is the murder of the Abbess Faife and the kidnapping of the young nuns who are accomanying her on her pilgrimage. The third is the murder of the determinedly UNfanatical scholar-monk Cináed, presumably at the hands of one of his fanatical opponents. But how does that fit in with the wrecking of the ship and the abduction of a bevy (school? flock?) of young nuns?
JM has been pushing me to read one of this series, and I must say I enjoyed it although (unlike him) I had not read the preceding book, The Leper's Bell, with the result that the continuing references to Uaman the Leper, Lord of the Passes, and the obvious horror inspired by his name, were lost on me, at least at first. But Sister Fidelma, a rather pushy version of Margaret Frazer's Sister Frevisse, is indomitable (I found myself sympathising with her poor husband - a Saxon in a strange land): once she enters the story you are carried along like a little boy gazing wide-eyed at his mummy or big sister knowing nothing really awful can possibly happen to her and she will sort everything out.
Actually, that is probably the great weakness of such series: the fact that the hero/heroine is never in any real danger. When Conan Doyle did the unthinkable and killed off Holmes, he was forced to retract. And Agatha Christie apparently left a Hercule Poirot book, Final Curtain, in which he dies, which was to be published after her own death. Still, this small weakness is as nothing compared to the all-encompassing security we feel in the presence of such a character. By the end of the book I had grown to envy the Saxon!
Read it. Some of the writing is marvellous, like the description of the storm and the wrecking in the opening pages. The chances are that you will want to read more of the same.
MBG
