The Butcher Bird

Starred review from February 15, 2016
British author Sykes establishes herself firmly as a major talent with this hard-edged sequel to 2015’s Plague Land. In 1351, Oswald de Lacy, the lord of Kent’s Somershill Manor, learns that his life is a lie. He’s actually the son of a peasant, switched at birth with the true heir, Thomas Starvecrow, who died in infancy. The revelation leads him to seek out Starvecrow’s grave, which turns out to contain only an effigy. Meanwhile, Oswald’s manorial court must deal with madman John Barrow, who claims to have been confronted by a monstrous bird that escaped into the night. Barrow becomes the target of a lynch mob after the corpse of a newborn girl, only just baptized, is left impaled on a thorn bush, as if by a butcher bird or shrike large enough to carry off a child. Sykes artfully integrates both puzzles with the politics of the time, as the survivors of the recent plague, which killed about half the English population, deal with its economic repercussions. Agent: Gordon Wise, Curtis Brown (U.K.).

February 15, 2016
A young lord with a reputation for crime solving is nearly overwhelmed by problems.In 1351, England struggles to recover from a plague that's killed half the population. At Somershill Manor, Lord Oswald de Lacy (Plague Land, 2015), a good-hearted, rather priggish young man who spent most of his early years in a monastery until his father and older brothers died and left him a thoroughly unprepared lord, is forbidden by law to pay higher wages to his starving tenants. A more immediate problem arises when one of them, John Barrow, is accused of siring an enormous Butcher Bird, who, it's claimed, has killed a baby and impaled it on a thorn bush. Impatient with such superstitions, Oswald locks Barrow up for the man's own safety while he tries to find out what really happened. At nearby Versey Castle, Oswald's sister Clemence, who's about to give birth, makes Oswald swear that Versey will go to her son. Only Clemence and her mother know that Oswald was switched at birth with the true de Lacy heir, a secret they're keeping for reasons of their own. Clemence survives a painful childbirth only to be aggravated past endurance by her mischievous young stepdaughters, Mary and Rebecca de Caburn. To spare her, Oswald takes them to Somershill only to see them run off to London to live with their aunt Eloise Cooper, a beautiful woman reputed to be a witch. Oswald grapples with superstition, poverty, and disease both in the country and on his trip to London to retrieve the runaways as he toils to solve the mystery and improve conditions for his tenants before they all desert him or starve. The second in Sykes' fine series is a puzzling mystery with a surprise at the end, filled with historical detail and, in Oswald, a slowly growing force to be reckoned with.

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