Book reviews - "A Prayer for the Damned", "Dancing with Demons" by Peter Tremayne

Due to a little confusion as to the sequence of books, I started reading Dancing with Demons (No. 16) until I realized I had missed A Prayer for the Damned (No. 15), so I ended up reading them back to back but in the proper order.  As with all Sister Fidelma mysteries, Tremayne presents an investigation which appears to be an open-and-shut case, but everyone’s favorite ancient Irish dalaigh manages to unravel a complicated, impossibly complex mystery.  He does a great job of keeping up the suspense and keeping the reader guessing until Fidelma has completed her report to the council.

A Prayer for the Damned opens with a beautiful, young woman throwing herself off a cliff, heartbroken over the loss of a love.  The main crux of the story is a fanatical abbot, who is wreaking havoc over the five kingdoms to have his views on celibacy and separation of sexes recognized as the top law, is murdered in Cashel, on the eve of Fidelma and Eadulf’s wedding.  One of the kings is seen leaving the abbot’s room just before the body is discovered.  In a shrewd move, the king requests Fidelma represent him to the High Council.  This means postponing her wedding.  Of course, Fidelma cannot stand by and let a client be railroaded into a conviction, not with so many other people wanting to kill the abbot.

Dancing with Demons begins with the High King Sechnussach being murdered in his bed and the murderer is discovered immediately afterwards, and commits suicide before he can be captured.  The Chief Brehon cannot investigate the assassination because it presents a conflict of interest (he and the king are members of the same clan), so Fidelma is called in.  Again, it appears it was an easy case to complete, but not for Fidelma.  She uncovers so much political intrigue and religious conflict, the reader can get overwhelmed.

That being said, there are aspects of Tremayne’s writing that make reading a little tedious.  He’s an expert on ancient Irish cultures.  We get it.  He knows what he’s talking about.  But the data dumps get weary.  It is interesting to know there were six types of roads in Eireann, but some of us like mysteries and do not want a history lesson, especially since only one of them is pertinent to the story.  Unless there is a quiz at the end.  Hint: There isn’t.

Also monotonous, he introduces ancient terms, which is fine, but follows them up with similar phrases like “Eadulf recognized the term for…”  “Eadulf was unfamiliar with the term and asked what it meant…” Sometimes, Tremayne just tells the reader what it is. 

Despite these issues, I continue to read Fidelma’s mysteries.  I find the glimpse into ancient Ireland fascinating and the stories are always satisfying.

I give them both ☘☘☘☘ out of 5

Book review - "The Prince of Darkness" by P. C. Doherty

I’m enjoying reading P.C. (Paul) Doherty’s medieval mystery series featuring Hugh Corbett, because the books seem to be getting better and better.  I just finished the fifth book, The Prince of Darkness, and I’m not sure if Doherty was referring to Prince Edward (who would become Edward II) or Satan, who apparently walked the corridors of the nunnery Corbett is investigating.

A goodly portion of this story takes place at Godstowe Priory, a nunnery where Lady Belmont, former lover of Prince Edward has died mysteriously, her body found at the foot of the stairs.  An uneasy truce exists between Edward I and Philip IV of France.  It is hoped that a marriage between Prince Edward and Philip’s daughter Isabelle will bring about lasting peace.  But Philip is trying to get out of the deal by creating scandal around the Prince of Wales.

Not that Prince Edward is above reproach.  His close relationship with Gaveston is the worst kept secret in Europe and nobody believes the death of his ex-paramour was anything but murder.  King Edward I sends his favorite clerk and spy, Hugh Corbett, to Godstowe Priory to find out what happened and keep his estranged son out of any scandal that would jeopardize the union. 

A tale involving naughty nuns, a mysterious death and political intrigue reminds me of Margaret Frazer’s Dame Frevisse novels or Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma.  This one ranks right up there with the best.  The final solution is a surprise but then Doherty puts a surprising twist at the end as well, giving the reader another shock.

This is why we read whodunits!

Review of Badger's Moon by Peter Tremayne

Peter Tremayne knows how to make sure his readers keep coming back for more of his work. One way is to write spell-binding mysteries rich with ancient Irish lore, customs and laws. Another way is to end a story with a cliff-hanger so shocking you’re forced to reach for the next novel.


He ends Badger’s Moon with such a cliffhanger. He ended Act of Mercy with Fidelma receiving a message that Brother Eadulf had been charged with murder, making the reader snatch up Our Lady of Darkness. I won’t put any spoilers in my review of Badger’s Moon but I made sure I had the next novel.

Badger’s Moon opens with Fidelma and Eadulf caring for their young son as they have agreed to a trial marriage. Fidelma drops the bombshell about the baby in the last sentence of The Haunted Abbot.

She and Eadulf are summoned to a village where three girls have been slaughtered, one each during the last three full moons. The villagers suspect strangers from across the sea are to blame. Their dark skin and strange language have stirred feelings of prejudice and hate. An angry mob appears at the abbey demanding their release.

Fidelma, in her usually snippy manner, relentlessly delves head-first into the investigation, demanding answers from everyone. Brother Eadulf becomes concerned as she is so focused on the mystery, Fidelma seems to have pushed their son completely from her mind. Both of them know she has changed but she refuses to discuss it.

Eadulf also worries that Fidelma is pursuing the matter of abandoned gold mines in the area rather than focusing on the seemingly ritualistic murders of the three young girls. Especially when a band of Ui Fidgente, enemies of Fidelma’s brother Colgu, king of Cashel, is seen in the area.

As usual, Fidelma plays her cards close to her chest and doesn’t reveal her thoughts until in true Tremayne fashion, she calls everyone together and delivers a sermon-like soliloquy for her conclusions.

Sometimes, Tremayne’s works are like reading a lesson book on ancient Irish culture with a mystery backdrop to make the education more interesting. However, both mystery and lesson in Badger’s Moon are interesting and exciting with an Agatha Christie-esque ending.

The Haunted Abbot by Peter Tremayne

I love a good haunted house story and although The Haunted Abbot didn’t linger much on spooky happenings at Aldred’s Abbey, it’s still a great mystery. Tremayne not only brings out the amazing culture of ancient Ireland but that of the British Isles including the Britons and Saxons as well.

Sister Fidelma’s companion in Tremayne’s incredible series, Brother Eadulf of Seaxmund’s Ham is a Saxon religieuse, which seems to be a contradiction in terms given their violent culture. As in the previous novel Smoke in the Wind, Eadulf is confronted repeatedly with the facts that his people are warriors and many of them adhere to their pagan ways. Although his has converted to Christianity, he is fiercely defensive of the Saxons and easily insulted with confronted by more enlightened peoples such as Fidelma’s Irish culture.

Eadulf and Fidelma travel through the Saxon wilderness toward Eadulf’s birthplace. He received an urgent message from a childhood friend, Brother Botolf to come to Aldred’s Abbey on a specific date and time. They manage to reach the abbey through a fierce blizzard just before the appointed hour, only to find Botolf has been murdered just hours before. While the bitterly cold weather takes a toll on Fidelma, Eadulf sets out to solve the mystery of his friend’s death. From the very start, he meets solid resistance from Abbot Cild, the very un-Christianlike head of Aldred’s Abbey. The cold, strict abbot has closed the community to all women and threatens to send Eadulf and Fidelma back into the bitter weather despite Fidelma’s illness.

There is also the ghost of a young woman, bearing a striking resemblance to the abbots’ deceased wife haunting the corridors of the abbey.

Despite the lack of evidence, Abbot Cild is convinced a local outlaw is responsible for the murder of Brother Botolf. He is equally adamant that Fidelma is a witch and has conjured the image of his late wife. Eadulf and Fidelma are warned from the very beginning that there is much evil in the abbey. They find not only evil but a sinister plot to deliver the Saxons into the hands of their long-time enemies, the Mercians.

To me, there is more than a passing resemblance of the plot in The Haunted Abbot to Smoke in the Wind, in which an enemy of the country infiltrated an abbey to use the brethren as pawns to draw the King’s troops into a futile battle, leaving the throne unprotected from its enemy neighbor. In The Haunted Abbot, an enemy of the country infiltrates Aldred’s Abbey to use it as a base of operations for nearly the same goal.

However, this novel lacks the brutality of the previous one and Tremayne focuses more on intrigue and subterfuge instead of violence. Also in this story, Fidelma and Eadulf advance their relationship as she agrees to become his ‘beloved woman’, which means she can enjoy all the benefits of marriage, although Eadulf has much more to gain than her. Besides this step to the next level, there doesn’t seem to be as much love and between them as simple companionship. Nothing has changed since the first novel, except that Eadulf doesn’t take Fidelma’s outbursts personally anymore.

Still, I’d like to see something more of romance, if something of the sort existed in ancient Ireland.

Smoke In The Wind by Peter Tremayne

In my previous posting, I reviewed A Wicked Deed by Susanna Gregory, another historical mystery novelist. In it, I mentioned how Gregory taught the reader about fourteenth century monastic life, alchemical recipes and business transactions for universities. Peter Tremayne does the exact same thing in his Sister Fidelma series set in ancient Ireland, giving the reader interesting insights into that culture in the mid-seventh century. I’ve enjoyed this series ever since reading a Sister Fidelma short story years ago. Tremayne weaves sinister plots with vibrant characters in the beautiful backdrop of Ireland.

In Smoke In The Wind, Tremayne takes Sister Fidelma and her ever-present companion Brother Eadulf into the land of the Britons. The Britons and the Saxons have a very bloody history but have enjoyed an extended period of peace, however tenuous. But Brother Eadulf is uncomfortable because he is a Saxon, and although there is no war between the peoples, some still have axes to grind. Nevertheless, he ventures deeper into the country to follow Fidelma who has been asked by a provincial king to investigate the mysterious disappearance of twenty-seven brothers from a monastery in his realm. And Eadulf knows that she will not back down from a mystery.

On their way to the monastery, they accompany Brother Meurig who is the Briton equivalent to Fidelma’s rank of dalaigh. He has been charged by the same king to investigate the murder of a young woman in a nearby village. Accused of her murder is a young shepherd whose guilt seems to have been determined by the villagers’ opinions. It isn’t long before Fidelma suspects that the two incidents are somehow connected.

Tremayne ramps up the action in Smoke In The Wind. Fidelma and Eadulf have oftentimes found themselves on the wrong side of a bow and arrow, but this is the first time that she is nearly raped by a captor. Fortunately, the cunning Eadulf manages to prevent Fidelma from being taken, but not before an exciting, white-knuckle page-turning scene that keeps the reader on the edge of the seat.

There were a couple of aspects of the novel that diminished its enjoyability but only by a small amount. First, there were too many scenes where Eadulf is about to speak but Fidelma stops him with a look or a gesture. The poor brother is hen-pecked and they aren’t even married. It’s not the notion of her keeping him in mental submission because she is in control of the conversation, but the frequency in which it happens.

Second, in the pre-Gutenburg Press era, everyone in the novel except for the villagers seems to be well-educated and knowledgeable of events two hundred years prior to the time of the novel. Perhaps the clergy and royalty were more educated than I previously surmised from other historical whodunits, but they seemed politically savvy as well.

Nonetheless, Smoke In The Wind is an action-thriller/mystery/history book that is enjoyable and entertaining. Very difficult to put down.

Our Lady of Darkness by Peter Tremayne

Tremayne continues his phenomenal series based on sleuth Sister Fidelma, a religuese and dalaigh in seventh century Ireland. She has been summoned back to Ireland from a pilgrimage as her friend and companion Brother Eadulf has been accused of murder. When she arrives at the castle of the kingdom bordering her brother’s, she finds that Eadulf has not only been convicted of raping and strangling a young girl, he is sentenced to hang the following day. Working quickly, Fidelma finds more than a few breaches in the law and the manner in which court was held.

Late that same evening, Fidelma argues for an appeal. The youthful and unfriendly king and his spiritual advisor, a long-time adversary of Fidelma’s, will deliver their decision the following morning. During the night, Eadulf is rescued from the abbey’s prison and whisked away to a place of sanctuary. He is soon told that he is free to leave the fortress by someone he has never seen before. Curious and suspicious, Eadulf walks out of his sanctuary only to find it is an attempt to murder him. He barely escapes with his life.

Fidelma is suspected by everyone to be an accomplice to the escape but she has no idea of his whereabouts. She continues her investigation and finds more deaths and disappearances surrounding the abbey and its quay on the river. A certain merchant seems to be at the center of the mystery, but when Fidelma finally locates him, the Abbess Fin is standing over his dead body with a bloodied knife in her hand.

Meanwhile, Eadulf heads east to reach the shore and find passage back to Saxony. His desire to see Fidelma overrides his need to escape and he heads back to the abbey. He encounters a blind man living alone. The blind man has heard of Eadulf but believes his story. He directs Eadulf how to return to the abbey by a circuitous route, stopping at a small monastery where he can have sanctuary before returning to the abbey.

On his way, Eadulf finds two captured girls, who tell him a tragic story of being sold by their dirt-poor fathers into slavery. Convinced that this is part of the mystery surrounding the abbey and the girl he was convicted of murdering, he takes them with him to the Yellow Mountain monastery. He thinks he is safe in the monastery but is rousted in the middle of the night by the young king and his hunters who had been lodging nearby. The King pronounces that Eadulf shall hang at dawn, but he is saved at the exact moment of his execution. One of Fidelma’s men has returned in the knick of time with one of the highest authorities in the five kingdoms of Ireland, the Brehon. They all return to the abbey where Eadulf is reunited with Fidelma.

She argues her case efficiently and with a precise detail to the situation and the knowledge of the law. She not only proves Brother Eadulf’s innocence but that of another Brother who was accused, convicted and executed for a murder he did not commit. It is a sordid tail of buying young girls from poor families and shipping them off to lives of slavery, in which the abbey played an important role. Fidelma exposes the mastermind behind the crimes.

Having saved Brother Eadulf from the gibbet, Fidelma is unsuccessful in convincing him to return with her to her brother’s kingdom of Cashel. Instead, he convinces her to return to Canterbury with him.

As usual, Tremayne takes the reader through a dizzying whirlwind of action, non-stop events and a complex story full of clues, which do not fall into place until Fidelma’s closing arguments. Tremayne also embellishes his stories with rich details of ancient Ireland its lands, cities and cultures, inserting many of the actual terms from the language of that era. Tremayne is the pseudonym of Peter Berresford Ellis, who is an expert on ancient Ireland. He relies heavily on this knowledge to bring seventh century Ireland alive and easily visualized by the reader.

The story switches back and forth between Fidelma’s point of view and Eadulf’s. We see and feel Fidelma’s fear and agony worrying about the fate of her close friend as she desperately tries to save him. Her intelligence, quick wit and temper give her the edge in every argument, but she continues to face opposition. Through Eadulf, we find that he has matured and is becoming as shrewd as Fidelma through his confinement, escape, recapture and near execution. He keeps his wits about him, a far cry from the earlier novels where he appeared to be mainly a mental punching bag for Fidelma.

As a result, this novel becomes a fast-paced, page-turner as we fear for Eadulf, a character we love, during several near-death experiences. There is no shortage of excitement, close-calls and strange events for him or Fidelma, as all lead and contribute to the final solution. Tremayne wastes no words on anything that detracts from the mystery. There isn’t even a backstory. Fidelma does not have many red herrings thrown at her, because everything has a place in the end. The reader has all the clues that Fidelma discovers but delivered in such a manner that they only make sense when the good Sister finally assembles them.

This is probably Tremayne’s best work since Suffer Little Children”, the third Fidelma mystery. Its excitement keeps the reader glued to the pages until the very last word.