To Kill or Cure

The Thirteenth Chronicle of Matthew Bartholomew.

It is the year 1357, and the University at Cambridge is in a sorry state.

Careful examination of the University’s finances reveals serious shortfalls. Meanwhile, the town’s landlords are demanding huge rent increases for the rooms they lease to students, and the plague has left the Colleges with scant money to pay for vital repairs to their walls and roofs. But for Matthew Bartholomew, Fellow of Michaelhouse, there is another problem nearer much closer to his heart: the arrival of a certain Richard Arderne, a healer with ‘magical’ powers, who claims to be able to awaken the dead.

But Arderne cannot banish death entirely. Not when it arrives in the form of murder. Is the killer a rapacious landlord? Or the healer himself, with his spells and incantations?

Against a backdrop of rivalry between town and gown, of gambling dens and missing persons, and of dissent between the Franciscans and Dominicans, Bartholomew and his colleague Brother Michael must find the viper in the University’s midst before the entire town descends into anarchy. And before Bartholomew and Michael themselves are killed…