An unholy alliance Book

An Unholy Alliance, the second of Susanna Gregory's Matthew Bartholomew historical mysteries is once again delightfully and informatively replete with much historical detail (not only with regard to Medieval Cambridge, but about the entire era of the Plague and how in the immediate aftermath of the same, a belief in the occult has tended to flourish, so that unscrupulous town and university worthies are able to make use of residents' legitimate fears and their justified frustrations that the Church had not been able to protect and save them from the Black Death). Presenting an evocative, as well as very immediate sense of both time and place, Susanna Gregory once again introduces, portrays characters who are delightfully human, who often tend to grow on you and become part of you to such an extent that you might even personally enjoy having some if not many of them as friends and perhaps even more (but I guess that holds mostly true for characters like Matthew, Brother Michael, Mathilde the Prostitute and Oswald Stanhope, as of course, the same cannot really be said about some of the lesser and especially the villainous personages, but truly, all of the presented and featured literary figures, both heroes and villains, are for the most part portrayed as richly nuanced, and even with regard to those characters who do end up as scoundrels, as criminals, their nastiness, their negativity, their threatening and dangerous natures, that is often not all that obvious and readily noticeable at the onset, is delightfully, sometimes even rather creepily and strangely hidden). Now truth be told, An Unholy Alliance actually features two separate mysteries, namely who is killing the town prostitutes, and who has kidnapped university officials and is engaging in seemingly satanic rituals in a decrepit unused church. And one is almost lulled into thinking that as soon as Matthew and Brother Michael have solved the second mystery (who is the main instigator of the satanic rituals, the kidnappings etc.) that the killer of the harlots has also been discovered, but that proves to be an illusion, a tragic mistake (and Sibylla the prostitute, who had been in hiding after having witnessed the murder of her friend, of another prostitute, is actually killed precisely because both she and her confidante Mathilde, as well as Matthew and Brother Michael are so convinced that the killer of the town harlots and the main mover and shaker with regard to the kidnappings of university officials and the instigator of the satanic rites are by necessity and similarity of action and behaviour one and the same and thus sadly and tragically let down their guard, lessen their prudence). Combined with an at times horrifying, yet thankfully always realistic ambience and sense of what Cambridge as a university and as a town was like during the Middle Ages, during the first bout of the Black Death and its immediate aftermath, An Unholy Alliance is highly recommended for ANYONE (but especially for historical mystery enthusiasts who are looking for a series that is not too gratuitously violent, that is intelligent, informative and has living and breathing, has authentic seeming persons as its cast of characters). And the academic setting of Cambridge University is an added bonus, an evocative painting of what academic life was like in Medieval Cambridge, Medieval Britain (not only its positives, but also its many negatives).