The Counterfeit Madam

April 11, 2011
The provost of Glasgow asks Gil Cunningham, the archbishop's quaester, to track down the source of counterfeit coins flooding the area in McIntosh's suspenseful eighth mystery set in 15th-century Scotland (after 2010's A Pig of Cold Vision). Gil's workload is doubled when Dame Isabella Torrance, a crusty old woman, is murdered by someone who inserted a nail in her ear. Isabella re-entered Gil's life after many years a short time before to propose a land transaction that would have exchanged two plots for the abandonment of Gil's foster-son's inheritance claim. The investigator suspects that the death may be connected with the presence of a brothel on one of the properties Isabella was seeking to barter. Gil and his wife, Alys, make a winning pair, and McIntosh deftly balances plot and period detail, though some might lament the lack of a glossary for archaic words like sasine.