In Cambridge, four children have been murdered. Wrongly accused of the crimes, a small community of Jews threatened by Catholic mobs is given sanctuary by Henry II. To assist in proving their innocence, he summons an expert in the science of deduction and the art of death. She is Adelia, a prodigy from the Medical School of Salerno, and an anomaly in a medieval world, who is forced to conceal her identity and her purpose from England's grave superstitions...

Set in 1176, Franklin's excellent third Mistress of the Art of Death novel (after The Serpent's Tale) finds Adelia Aguilar, a qualified doctor from the School of Medicine in Salerno, in the holy town of Glastonbury, where Henry II has sent her to inspect two sets of bones rumored to be those of Arthur and Guinevere. Henry is hoping that an unequivocally dead Arthur will discourage the rebellious Welsh. The bones have been uncovered by the few monks,...

Allie, the daughter of Adelia Aguilar and a skilled healer with her mother's knowledge of anatomy and sleuthing, is dispatched to the Cambridgeshire village of Ely. There her courtship with a young aristocrat is complicated by her investigation into the disappearances of several local girls