A presumption of death Book

This first of Susanna Gregory's Matthew Bartholomew novels still (and after more than fifteen years) ranks amongst my very favourites of this now quite extensive series (my original copy of A Plague on Both Your Houses, I literally stumbled upon in an airport bookstore in August 2000, and I actually managed to read the entire novel on my four hour flight from Calgary to Toronto, so enthralling and interesting the plot and the featured characters proved to be). Full of informative historical details (not only with regard to Medieval Cambridge, but the entire era of the Plague, the Black Death), and presenting an evocative, immediate sense of both time and place, the author introduces, portrays characters who grow on you, characters who become part of you and whom you might even personally enjoy having as friends and perhaps even more (well more characters like Matthew, Brother Michael, and Oswald Stanhope, as of course, the same cannot really be said with regard to some of the lesser and villainous personages, but truly, all of the presented and featured literary figures, both heroes and villains, are portrayed as richly nuanced, and even with those who do end up as scoundrels, as criminals, their villainy, their negativity, is often not all that obvious at the onset, is delightfully and even sometimes rather creepily and strangely hidden).

Combined with an at times horrifying, yet always thankfully 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, A Plague on Both Your Houses is highly recommended for ANYONE (but especially for historical mystery enthusiasts who are looking for a series that is intelligent, informative and has living and breathing, has authentic seeming persons as its cast of characters and is also generally not too overly and/or gratuitously violent in scope and nature). And the academic setting of Cambridge University is and always will be a much loved and massively personally appreciated added bonus, an evocative painting of academic life in Medieval Cambridge, Medieval Britain, of both its positives and also its negatives.