The Way Between the Worlds

December 5, 2011
Set in 1092, Clare’s enjoyable fourth whodunit featuring apprentice healer Lassair (after 2010’s Music of the Distant Stars) finds Lassair living in Cambridge with a wizard, Gurdyman, from whom she hopes to learn the secrets of alchemy. Plagued by disturbing dreams, she interprets these as an effort on the part of a loved one to alert her that he or she is in distress. Her worst fears are realized when word reaches her family that a nun at the abbey where her sister, Elfritha, serves has been murdered in a manner suggesting the victim was intended as a ritual sacrifice. Clare does a nice job of weaving the real-life political concerns of the time—King Malcolm of Scotland has designs on the English crown—into the story line, though readers should be prepared for a world in which magic is real.

Starred review from December 15, 2011
Clare's Aelf Fen series, set in eleventh-century England, gets better and better. In the latest installment, neophyte healer Lassair experiences disturbing dreams, in which someone she can't identify is calling for her help. Terrified that a member of her family is in danger, Lassair leaves Cambridge and the home of her mentor, Gurdyman, for her home village. There, she learns that her beloved sister, Elfritha, a novice nun at nearby Chatteris Abbey, is critically ill, and another nun has been murdered. But even when Elfritha begins to mend, the disturbing dreams continue. While Lassair is still trying to discover what her dreams mean, the reader is transported to northern England, where Rollo, a Norman knight, has been given a dangerous and desperate mission by the king of England, a mission on which the future of the country depends. While carrying out the king's task, Rollo comes perilously close to death, and he knows in his heart that only Lassair, the woman he loves, and who loves him in return, can extract him from his horrifying predicament. From the very first page, readers are taken on a thrilling, dangerous, suspenseful, otherworldly, pulse-quickening journey, and until the very last, it's not clear whether the ending will be happy or disastrous. A must for historical mystery aficionados.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)