THE UNBURIED

Palliser’s penchant for riddles wrapped in enigmas (Betrayals, 1995, etc.) continues with a busy tale, set in a cathedral in the south of England, about an old recluse murdered for his money, and an old friendship that has seen better days. Unassuming scholar Ned Cortine, a historian at Oxford, has come to spend a few days before Christmas, 1882, in the ancient town of Thurcester, ostensibly to visit a friend from his youth, Austin, whom he hasn—t seen in more than 20 years. More importantly, however, Ned hopes to locate a manuscript in the cathedral library that would refute a rival historian on an obscure point in Anglo-Saxon history. But a hostile greeting and strange behavior from Austin, coupled with Ned’s introduction to a curious murder in the cathedral several centuries earlier, cast shadows on his research, and he finds himself caught up in present- day intrigues as well as ancient. Just as he uncovers the 11th-century prize he seeks, he’s jolted from the past by being identified, along with Austin, as the last to have seen old Mr. Stonex, Thurcester’s reclusive banker, alive before his brutal murder. Then, as if that weren’t enough, a body is found in a wall of the cathedral, the remains of the man believed to have been murdered those several centuries before. Ned succeeds in unraveling the old mystery but, in an inquest, fails to persuade anyone with his theory about who killed Stonex, leaving the wrong man to be charged. His failure, accompanied by an assault on his integrity as a historian and the belief that Austin was involved in the murder, prompts him to leave town sadder but much wiser, content to record his experiences privately for posterity. A complex puzzler, though the real story here, which is finely done even in its anachronistic 19th-century style, is the simple one of a decent man forced at last to open his eyes and take a good look around.