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"Wighard, Archbishop designate of Canterbury, has been found dead, garrotted in his chambers in Rome's Lateran Palace in the autumn of A.D. 664. His murderer seems apparent to all, since an Irish religieux was arrested by the palace guards as he fled Wighard's chamber, but the monk denies responsibility for the crime, and the treasures missing from Wighard's chambers are nowhere to be found." "The bishop in charge of affairs at the Lateran Palace suspects a political motive and is wary of charging anyone without independent evidence. So he asks Sister Fidelma of the Celtic Church to look into Wighard's death. Fidelma (an advocate of the Brehon Court), working with Brother Eadulf of the Roman Church, quickly finds herself with very few clues, too many motives, a trail strewn with bodies - and very little time before the killer strikes again."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved… (more)
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The 2nd installment sees Sister Fidelma in Rome. It’s curious that the series touts itself as “a mystery of ancient Ireland”, because the first two books are set in Saxon England and in Rome, respectively. We
Fidelma has been sent to Rome by the religious authorities in Ireland to see approval for the rule of the community at Kildare. She meets figures from the first book: Brother Eadulf, to whom she is attracted and Archbishop of Canterbury-designate Wighard. He is murdered, and the pope himself is anxious for Fidelma and Eadulf to find the killer because given the tensions between the Celtic and Roman sects, war could break out in England if one side believed the other had assassinated.
The plot is resolved, of course, but not before a great many other religious are killed off. Makes you wonder how the Christian churches managed to survive, given the high mortality rate of its clerics!
Through Sister Fidelma, Tremayne does not hesitate to criticize the Roman Church and its fondness for luxury and expensive trappings for its religious buildings and accoutrements, as well as hold up for ridicule the superstitious beliefs in relics, such as the True Cross (not even in Palestine under the best of conditions is wood going to last that long) and the staircase Christ descended from Pilate’s palace, all venerated by the Church in Rome.
Tremayne’s description of 7th century Rome, the impact of the rise of Islam, and the politics of the Roman Church, even if fictionalized, make the book interesting. The prose is marginally better than the first book, and there is an interesting subplot involving the famous ancient library in Alexandria, destroyed in the 7th century. I’m still don’t think that the series is as good as the Brother Caedfel series—for one thing, Tremayne is fond of Nero Wolfe type endings where all the suspects are gathered together and Fidelma, in a long, drawn-out scene, goes through the evidence, the logic,and then identifies the culprit. But I have the next two books and will continue to read to see if they are an improvement, because I still like the basic premise of a setting in 7th century Celtic culture. There’s hope.