Act of Mercy

October 22, 2001
As usual, persuasive period detail lifts Tremayne's (The Monk Who Vanished) latest Sister Fidelma mystery. The year is A.D. 666. On Ardmore Bay, on the Irish south coast, a tavern keeper named Colla finds the body of a young woman killed with a knife. ("The white linen of her shift was ripped and torn and suffused in blood. He had never seen such savagery inflicted with a knife before. The body had been cut—hacked—as if a butcher had mistaken the young woman's soft flesh for that of a lamb to be slaughtered.") From then on, we are at sea in more ways than one: Sister Fidelma joins a small group sailing aboard The Barnacle Goose
on a pilgrimage to the Holy Shrine of St. James. On the first night out, the ship is buffeted by a relentless storm, and Sister Muirgel is apparently washed overboard; a thorough search of the ship fails to turn up her body. When her bloodstained robe is found, murder is suspected, and Sister Fidelma begins an investigation; but things are not quite what they seem. With a killer on board, Sister Fidelma must solve the mystery and unmask the murderer before the ship reaches the shrine; unfortunately, the denouement, while plausible, is slightly disappointing after the elaborate buildup. Still, for those addicted to historical mysteries in general (and Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael series in particular), this delivers: the tactile and sensory impressions of being aboard a seventh-century sailing ship are vividly rendered, right down to the taffrail and the mainmast. Author tour. (Nov. 12)FYI:Tremayne is the pseudonym of Celtic historian Peter Berresford Ellis.