Customer Reviews

The Abbot's Gibbet: A Medieval West Country Mystery (Knights Templar)

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This is the fifth book in Michael Jeck's entertaining Knights Templar Mysteries. The main characters Sir Baldwin de Furnshill, Keeper of the King's Peace and his friend the Bailiff Simon Puttock are now old friends to the reader. Combine the inter action between the main characters with the beautiful background of west country Devon and it is obvious that Michael Jecks is on to a winner with his increasingly popular books.

Medieval novels are becoming increasingly popular with the reading public and there are a number of well written books by authors such as Paul Doherty, Bernard Knight, Susanna Gregory, to name but a few. Michael Jecks is steadily getting himself on a par with these fine novelists.

Sir Baldwin de Furnshill and his close friend the Bailiff Simon Puttock are visiting Tavistock, as guests of the Abbot, intending to enjoy the fair and all the town has to offer. Responsible for justice in the area, the Abbot enlists the help of his friends when a headless body is found. But there is one big problem. How can they identify the victim without first finding the head?

First Sentence: The sun was almost unbearably hot, the journey distinctly uncomfortable.

It is 1319 and people have come from all over to attend the Tavistock fair. Sir Baldwin Fernshill, Keeper of the King's Peace, and Simon Puttock, bailiff of Lydford have come as guests of Abbot Robert Champeaux. When a headless body is found, the Abbott asks Baldwin and Simon to investigate.

Jecks has become a favorite author of mine and I really liked this book. The sense of time and place is wonderful. The plot is interesting and kept me guessing. There's good suspense, a hint of romance and even a good chase scene, albeit on horseback. There are great characters that are fully developed to the point where I feel involved in the lives of the main characters and want to keep following their lives. This was another very enjoyable book in a delightful series.

Jenks knows how to write and tell a good story that is historically accurate. A really good "whodunit."

[...]

I was so glad to find this Knights Templar mystery by Michael Jecks on Kindle as I had been stymied in my quest to this point. None of Jecks' many, many medieval mysteries has been recorded by the National Library Services for the Blind and Handicapped. Not one. But I am gratefully saved.

The hero of the Knights Templar mysteries is Sir Baldwin, a former Templar out of a job when the Pope and the King of France disbanded the order of the Church Militant in order to avoid paying debts to them and to seize all their wealth. It's bad enough to lose a job you really love, or even to do so on trumped up charges, but imagine losing that job while watching your colleagues, many of them dear to you, tortured and burned at the sake. Sir Baldwin is understandably bitter, cynical and interested in seeing uncorrupted justice done.

In The Abbot's Gibbet Sir Baldwin is visiting an annual fair in Tavistock with his friend Sir Simon and Simon's matchmaking wife Margaret. The two Sirs are called in to hellp solve the mystery of the death and subsequent beheading of an unknown man the very night before the fair's start. Numerous robberies of merchant's stalls by a monk, then the death, apparently by suicide of another monk, break up the monotony of Baldwin's growing interest in a woman named Jean, a friend of Simon's and Margarets'. The story is complicated by several subplots, some of which come together in the end. A merchant's daughter falls for a Venetian trader. A whiny cook helps hide the identity of his reputedly outlawed brother. A young monk decides to leave the monastery because he is in love with that same merchant's daughter. The Venetians, father and son, are suspected of foul deeds. A friar raging against mammon and bankers and profits taxes the patience of all. Contract security guards hired for the duration of the fair set up and enforce a protection racket. And everyone, including the reader, is waiting to see who ends up dangling from The Abbot's Gibbet.

This is a thoroughly satisfying if not brilliant murder mystery. It manages to set forth enough confusing detail to make it a challenge to solve, but a fun one. There are some logical jumps during the investigations, such as concluding the slain monk could not have thrown the cudgel across the alley, or that it was even his. One serious storyline involving the identity of a little girl saved years before by one of the suspects is only half resolved at the end, making me wonder if both characters are meant to turn up in sequels.

The two greatest virtues of this novel are, I think, the distinctly drawn and interesting characters and the detail of the town and its fair. I found the latter fascinating, full of details about how the stalls were set up and organized, what items were for sale and how they were prepared and packaged, and numerous other administrative and practical aspects that were worth reading the book all by themselves.

As I mentioned, I read this book on my Kindle2. It is also available in hardback and paperback, all thee can be found here. It is not available from NLS nor BookShare.

I love this series. I highly reccommend it to anyone with an interest in 14th c life.