The year 1264 marks a turbulent period for England, with Simon de Montfort challenging the sovereignty of King Henry III, the Crown at the point of expelling all Jews from England, and Roger Bacon's scientific experimentalism contending against faith and superstition. Bacon's pupil at Oxford, Regent Master William Falconer, finds his belief in Aristotelian logic (though not his conviction that the earth is round) sorely tested by a series of murders beginning with Margaret Gebetz, servant to his surly fellow master John Fyssh. The young woman's throat was cut practically within sight of Thomas Symon, who has arrived at Oxford to study with Falconer; but the only clue to her murder is a mysterious book she was carrying even though she was illiterate. The book makes its way from the hands of Gebetz's Jewish friend Hannah to Symon to rhetoric master Richard Bonham, who peremptorily confiscates it, to Fyssh, who's seen with it shortly before his own murder. First-novelist Morson drops teasing clues concerning the book's true nature, though it's only the most dedicated medieval historian who'll beat Falconer in tying the killer to the background political conflicts. Conscientiously shadowy—the Dark Ages at their darkest— with a whirlwind climax: a between-courses palate-cleanser for Ellis Peters fans.
Pub Date: Jan. 21, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-11784-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A super-exorcism that leaves the taste of somebody else's blood in your mouth and what a bad taste it is. King presents us with the riddle of a small Maine town that has been deserted overnight. Where did all the down-Easters go? Matter of fact, they're still there but they only get up at sundown. . . for a warm drink. . . .Ben Mears, a novelist, returns to Salem's Lot (pop. 1319), the hometown he hasn't seen since he was four years old, where he falls for a young painter who admires his books (what happens to her shouldn't happen to a Martian). Odd things are manifested. Someone rents the ghastly old Marsten mansion, closed since a horrible double murder-suicide in 1939; a dog is found impaled on a spiked fence; a healthy boy dies of anemia in one week and his brother vanishes. Ben displays tremendous calm considering that you're left to face a corpse that sits up after an autopsy and sinks its fangs into the coroner's neck. . . . Vampirism, necrophilia, et dreadful alia rather overplayed by the author of Carrie (1974).
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1975
ISBN: 0385007515
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The previous books of this author (Devil of a State, 1962; The Right to an Answer, 1961) had valid points of satire, some humor, and a contemporary view, but here the picture is all out—from a time in the future to an argot that makes such demands on the reader that no one could care less after the first two pages.
If anyone geta beyond that—this is the first person story of Alex, a teen-age hoodlum, who, in step with his times, viddies himself and the world around him without a care for law, decency, honesty; whose autobiographical language has droogies to follow his orders, wallow in his hate and murder moods, accents the vonof human hole products. Betrayed by his dictatorial demands by a policing of his violence, he is committed when an old lady dies after an attack; he kills again in prison; he submits to a new method that will destroy his criminal impulses; blameless, he is returned to a world that visits immediate retribution on him; he is, when an accidental propulsion to death does not destroy him, foisted upon society once more in his original state of sin.
What happens to Alex is terrible but it is worse for the reader.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1962
ISBN: 0393928098
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1962
SEEN & HEARD
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