Bruce Holsinger's A Burnable Book introduced readers to unlikely medieval detectives John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer. Fans will be pleased to know that the sequel, The Invention of Fire, revisits 14th-century London a year later, as the intrepid scholarly sleuths ply their deduction skills again.
A medieval scholar, Holsinger puts his knowledge of the period's history and literature to use in this tale of murder and intrigue in 1386, during the corrupt reign of Richard II. The book opens on a night scene of a gong farmer and his son working by lantern-light to clean the muck of human excrement that has clogged up at the Long Dropper privy, next to the Thames. They come upon a "mound of ruined men," all dead. The next day, the renowned and well-connected poet Master Gower is summoned to the Priory of St. Bartholomew to look at the bodies, nearly naked, 16 of them. A surgeon, recently trained in Bologna, cuts into the back of one man to extract a "spherical object about the diameter of a half noble." These men, he tells Gower, were shot with a "handgonne." It's a word new to Gower but one that would "shape and fill the weeks to come."
Gower visits his good friend Chaucer to ask if he might have heard about a group of strangers who recently came to London. Chaucer suggests that Gower talk to the warden of Aldgate, one of the many gates connected to the wall that surrounds the 330-acre city of London and its 15,000 inhabitants. Throughout the course of his walk around the wall, Gower learns about the recent sighting of a party of Welshman. Could those be the men who met their fate in the privy? Who killed them and why?
The game is afoot and Gower is our learned guide to all things medieval. Little by little we become familiar with this enclosed world and its perimeters, including a visit to Calais and the lives of the people within, high and low, where and how they live--as well as the unscrupulous court and military that rules everyone, making Gower's inquiries about murdered men a risky undertaking. Authenticity is the hallmark of this world Holsinger so vividly brings to life, and his use of period language and words (wherry, groats) adds another fascinating layer of believability.
Ominously, the "handgonne" takes center stage in this mystery from more than 600 years ago. As William Snell, chief armorer to His Royal Highness the King, tells Stephen Marsh, a master of the smithy and foundry: "We are after something new.... A maximum of delivery with a minimum of effort.... Deadly efficiency" in a gun the "size of a ram's cock." Investigating another attack with this new weapon in a wooded area, "savaged as if by some high-grazing herd of pigs, feeding on branches instead of roots," Gower and Chaucer are confronted by none other than the Duke of Gloucester. Could he be involved? Could a possible uprising against the king be the reason these men were killed? Holsinger's medieval mystery featuring two famous writers succeeds on every level and will have readers hoping for more. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher
Shelf Talker: This sequel featuring the unlikely detective team of John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer is a terrific period mystery.