Company of Liars

August 25, 2008
Desperate to outrun the Black Death ravaging England during the sodden summer of 1348, nine disparate souls band together in this harrowing historical, which infuses a Canterbury Tales
scenario with the spectral chill of an M. Night Shyamalan ghost story. Maitland (The White Room
) gives each of the travelers a potentially devastating secret. How did narrator Camelot, a glib-tongued peddler of false relics and hope, really come by that hideously scarred face? What is magician Zophiel hiding inside his wagon? And just who is Narigorm, the spooky albino girl whose readings of the runes are always eerily on target? As the nine strangers slog cross-country through the pestilential landscape, their number shrinking one by one, they come to realize that what they don't know about each other might just kill them. Despite Maitland's yarn-spinning prowess, her narrative occasionally stalls because of unrelenting grimness and an increasingly predictable plot—that is, until its gasp-out-loud finale.

August 15, 2008
In England, 1348 was a very bad year: rains fell from Midsummer's Day to Christmas, causing crops to rot in the fields, and the plague swept through the country, killing and displacing high and low alike. Told from the viewpoint of Camelot, a peddler of relics, Maitland's story twists and turns deftly as a motley crew of travelers seek to hide their secrets from one another. Held together more by fear than comradeship, they wend their way across the south of England, seeking lasting refuge from the uncertainties of life. Like the pilgrims of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales", to which this book has been likened, each of the travelers has a tale to tell. Those tales intertwine and unfold in a page-turning novel in which hope seeks to balance despair despite everything. Maitland, whose previous novel, "The White Room", was released in the United Kingdom 12 years ago, has put the intervening years to good use. This novel vividly evokes the landscape of 14th-century England without putting too many 21st-century interpretations on actions and events. Public libraries should have this on their shelves. [See Prepub Alert & Prepub Mystery, "LJ" 6/1/08.]Pamela O'Sullivan, SUNY at Brockport Lib.

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2008
Imagine a sinister version of Chaucers Canterbury Tales, overlaid with a touch of And Then There Were None. Far from the royal courts pageantry, nine outcasts form an unlikely band that, beginning on Midsummers Day, 1348, journeys across England in an attempt to outrun the Black Plague. Camelot, a disfigured peddler of fake relics, narrates; others include an expectant young couple, an Italian minstrel and apprentice, an ill-tempered magician, an herbalist, a storyteller with a swans wing for an arm, and an albino child rune reader whose predictions are uncannily prescient. Each reveals his story; each hides a dark secret that proves his undoing.Maitland excels at describing the bleak, devastated landscape of a pestilence-torn country, with its rampant famine and superstitious, terrified inhabitants, although the pace approaches that of the travelers, trudging endlessly through the mud and muck. Likewise, some revelations are signposted too clearly. But interspersed in the cheerless realism, theres much to absorb about medieval folk customs, garments, guilds, and religion. These details, plus the intriguing characters and burgeoning suspense, keep pages turning.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)