Booklog 26/26: Sarah Hawkswood: Vale of Tears – Bradecote and Catchpoll #5 – Audiobook

[jacey]

April 1144. A distinctively dressed corpse is fished out of Flatbury Mill leat on the river. It turns out that he is an Evesham horse dealer who has been stabbed and tipped into the river upstream. Investigations lead Bradecote and Catchpoll (with under-serjeant Walkelin) at first to his young wife (who has a couple of lovers) and the man’s brother, but then they discover that the dead man’s sister has married the ill-tempered lord of Harvington and has died in mysterious circumstances, without her family being invited to the funeral. Is that another murder? There’s a dispute over the ownership of a mill between the lord of Harvington and the Abbey in Evesham, and Harvington has recently hanged a scribe for theft—the same scribe who verified the mill-lease as belonging to Harvington. When a Harvington serving girl is also killed, Walkelin is falsely accused.  Bradecote and Catchpoll must mount a rescue before unravelling the knotty mystery and solving the various crimes. As usual, Matt Addis’s reading is excellent and the twisty plot engaging. Just a puzzled reader's question: why change the style of the covers? This is very bland.