An Unholy Alliance - Softcover

Brilliantly combining medicine, murder, and mystery in the middle ages, Susannah Gregory introduces a compelling new protagonist in Cambridge physician and forensic sleuth Matthew Bartholomew.

In 1350, Cambridge lies ravaged by the Black Death. Plague victims fill its graveyards, hunger haunts its filthy alleys, and superstitious folk blame the Church. Crime flourishes, too: three harlots are found with slit throats and branded feet, a friar dies rifling a strongbox full of college chronicles, and the Vice Chancellor of the University vanishes from his sick chamber with all its furnishings.

Now the Chancellor calls on the deductive skill of Matthew Bartholomew, Master of Medicine. Busy enough already with the teaching and practise of controversial new techniques learned from an Arabian physician, Bartholomew welcomes the investigative help of portly Brother Michael--a shrewd and merry monk, not unduly shocked by sins of the flesh. And soon--from an exotic poison to a surge of devil worship, from a grisly exhumation to a sweetheart's dying words--they are on a tangled and perilous trail of conspiracy and obsession...crossed again and again by murder.

Susanna Gregory was a police officer in Leeds before taking up an academic career. She has served as an environmental consultant during seventeen field seasons in the polar regions, and has taught comparative anatomy and biological anthropology.

She is the creator of the Matthew Bartholomew series of mysteries set in medieval Cambridge and the Thomas Chaloner adventures in Restoration London, and now lives in Wales with her husband, who is also a writer.