The Devil's Monk

June 15, 2015
Superstition clashes with reality in Fraser’s workmanlike sixth mystery featuring Constable Thomas Potts (after 2013’s Til Death Do Us Part). When a pregnant female corpse battered beyond recognition and wearing male garb is discovered near a Worcestershire haystack in the summer of 1829, locals blame the ghost of a medieval reprobate known as the Devil’s Monk. The investigation offers welcome distraction for Potts, whose wife, traumatized by a recent miscarriage, has decamped for parts unknown. After the hatchet murder of an elderly man who had information about the first crime, Potts suspects farmworker Jared Styler, a violent womanizer. Dialogue tags contain too many adverbs, and neither the resolution of the marital crisis nor the conclusion of the mystery fully convinces. But a winning new character appears in George Maffey, a military veteran reduced to legalized begging, and the accurate depiction of an oft-romanticized period will appeal to lovers of British history. Fraser is the pen name of Roy Clews, a one-time Marine commando and Foreign Legionnaire.

A village constable is nothing less than a bloodhound on the trail of murder. Serving as constable of Redditch Town may be a position considerably below his station in life, but it's one that Tom Potts enjoys, at least until George Maffey, a soldier invalided out after Waterloo, reports finding the badly damaged body of a woman in men's clothes. After Potts' wife, Amy, miscarries, she leaves him and goes back to her old job as a barmaid. Even though she still loves Potts, Amy's convinced that no child she might conceive with him would survive. Potts hires Maffey to help with the case of the dead woman, who, despite all his efforts, remains unidentified. Barmy Methuselah Leeson's claim that he's seen the murderer and it's the Devil's Monk is widely accepted by the superstitious populace, particularly after he too is murdered. Then Potts discovers that Jared Styler, a brutal man known for beating women, has sent his lover, Carrie Perks, to pawn Methuselah's snuffbox and becomes convinced that he's found the killer. His conviction only grows firmer when Carrie is badly beaten and disappears. While Potts struggles to find evidence against Styler, who strongly denies his guilt, Amy, seeking adventure, apprentices herself as a high wire artist to charismatic balloonist Vincent Sorenty. Although Fraser (The Drowned Ones, 2010, etc.) continues to provide social commentary and vivid descriptions of the harsh realities of the early 1800s, the mystery this time is weak. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.