The second chronicle of Matthew Bartholemew is in slightly less of a hurry to impress than its predecessor - A Plague On All Your Houses. That was altogether a less confident slightly stilted piece of writing in comparison to this sequel. Having already established the personality of Matthew Bartholemew and his side kick Micheal, left Susanne Gregory time to put more flesh on the bones of them. So they feel more rounded figures than previously, and the narrative has an easier flow.
This time around we have a chest of documents in which the body of a dead monk is found. The mystery is how he got into both the locked room and the chest. There have already been a number of unexplained murders of prostitutes in Cambridge. Sheriff Tulyelt seems not to be doing his job in looking for the murderer in either case. Add in the recent appearance of two nefarious witch covens and you can see the story is already getting jam packed with incident, questions and possible red herrings.
Gregory's stories, at least what I've read so far, tend to be short on descriptive power or psychological depth of detail. With a writer like CJ Samson he vividly creates a sense of the time, its medieval smells and character evocatively written. As is his protagonists inner world. And this jumps off the page at you. One does not get much sense of that richly patinated detail with Gregory. There are a lot of clunky plot devices, too many concealed facts, and rather two dimensional characters.
In this story she has a supposedly dead body that goes missing. Were they really dead? If they were who has moved them? Which is a device she used in the first book. Then there are twists and reveals, such as one male character who turns out to disguise himself by dressing in drag as a mysterious brothel madame. Which is the sort of thing that stretched my usually patient credulity far too far.
The Mathew Bartholemew Chronicles are workmanlike medievalism, modest affairs, not necessarily badly written, but certainly not engagingly written. After two novels in succession I already feel I've got the measure of her qualities and limitations as a writer. As there are over twenty novels in this series, I'll dip into them from time to time, but only when I need a lighter less demanding read.
CARROT REVIEW - 5/8
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