The Lost Prophecies

Grisly fun! This fourth collaboration of the Medieval Murderers, six British writers of historical mysteries, begins in sixth-century Ireland, where a mad monk pens a book of enigmatic prophesies predicting all sorts of future mayhem. Accounts follow of six murder investigations recounted by the authors' signature sleuths, beginning in twelfth-century Essex, progressing to Shakespeare's London, and then jumping to the 22nd century, on the eve of Judgment Day. Mellifluous Paul Matthews has narrated other volumes by the participating scribes, so he comes to this one well prepared. His fine-tuned sense of dramatic propriety prevents excess while fueling tension and suspense. His fine voice and impeccable diction make the prose sound more eloquent than it reads on the page. Y.R. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

December 15, 2008
In the Medieval Murderers' absorbing fourth serial historical (after 2007's House of Shadows
), six British mystery authors—Bernard Knight, Ian Morson, Michael Jecks, Philip Gooden, Susanna Gregory, C.J. Sansom—chart the impact of the Black Book of Brân over the centuries. In 574, the infant Brân washes ashore in Ireland with the eponymous book of prophesies, leading local churchmen to believe him to be demonic. More than 600 years later, the sinister tome causes havoc in Exeter when coroner John de Wolfe and cleric Thomas de Peyne must cope with priests who have caught gold fever during a killing spree. Brân's manuscript makes an implausible side trip to snowy 1262 Russia, but it's soon back in England amid mayhem in Westminster Abbey. The prophetic book, which has “a habit of bringing out the worst in people,” winds up in an appropriately apocalyptic future of polar ice melt, nuclear war, earthquakes and floods.