The fourth novel in P.C. (Paul) Doherty’s series featuring Hugh Corbett, The Angel of Death is more of the whodunit we all love to read on par with Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table and Michael Jeck’s The Sticklepath Strangler. The final solution comes down to a very meticulous staging of who was standing exactly where when the vicious crime was committed, since the perpetrator is in full view of several people and still manages to do away with his victim. In Cards on the Table, Hercule Poirot had to figure out where everyone was sitting and their activities during a game of bridge. In The Sticklepath Strangler, Sir Baldwin Furnshill had to determine the order of people walking along a path to resolve the crime. In The Angel of Death, Hugh Corbett had to find out the sequence of passing a cup of wine around a small group of priests after one dies from poisoning. In each of these, the reader has to pay attention (and still may not be able) to figure out the details without some sort of visual aid. I might have to try that sometime.
When the priest of St. Paul’s, Walter de Montfort, dies violently
and suddenly during communion, Edward I charges Hugh Corbett to discover what
happened. Had the poison been meant for
the king, since de Montfort, family member of the king’s most hated enemies,
was about to lecture Edward I against taxing the church?
The mystery is compounded by the presence of several other
members of clergy who were present during the service and drank from the same
chalice de Montfort had.
Corbett and his faithful servant Ranulf traipse all over
London, questioning hostile priests, trying to figure out how to poison someone
in the midst of a crowd. Corbett is also
pining over his new beloved, Maeve, whom he met in Wales the previous novel, A Spy In Chancery. It does seem as though Corbett falls in love
or is pining over a lost love in every novel.
I liked the twists and turns this novel has and consider it
the best of the series so far.
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