A bone of contention Book

Now compared to the first two novels of Susanna Gregory's Matthew Bartholomew series, compared to both A Plague on Both Your Houses and An Unoly Alliance, the third installement, A Bone of Contention, it sure does feel and read rather overly convoluted in both nature and set-up, focussing on far too many diverse (and sometimes even a bit unrealistic) scenarios (and yes sadly, also presenting readers with far far too many corpses, as well as a cast of players both positive and negative that tends to prove at least in my opinion both over-extensive and even at times annoyingly and unnecessarily confounding and hard to keep organised in one's mind).

For indeed, with the plethora of constantly changing and emerging plot twists and turns, even the back story and main thematics of A Bone of Contention (the allegedly martyred Simon d'Ambrey and whether the bones found in the King's Ditch near Cambridge College's Vallence Marie are his and therefore possibly holy relics) often become rather lost in the overly numerous parade of the murdered and potential villains (too many proverbial red herrings and that even after it has been proven by Brother Michael and Matthew Barotholomew that Simon d'Ambrey was actually not martyred but in fact did manage to escape from his pursuers and has now returned to Cambridge to plan an elaborate revenge on both town and gown, d'Ambrey continuously manages to give everyone the slip again and again and wreak even more havoc, this does end up feeling both monotonously far-fetched and in a way also as though Susanna Gregory somehow needed to pad the main storyline of A Bone of Contention up a bit in order to fill the pages, in order to make her novel long enough).

And therefore, while A Bone of Contention does indeed like the first two novels of the series show a wonderfully authentic feeling sense of time and place (presents a historically accurate seeming and feeling portrait of both Mediaeval Cambridge and Cambridge University during the time of and immediately post the first manifestions of the Black Death), the story itself, the nitty-gritty details of A Bone of Contention do leave me rather unsatisfied and certainly wishing that Susanna Gregory had streamlined and limited her story a bit, especially with regard the amount of deaths, of corpses and plot reversals encountered (and I am also sincerely hoping that the remaining novels of the Matthew Bartholomew series will hopefully be a trifle more realistic in scope, read less over-convoluted and with not as much constant death).