THE CLERK’S TALE

The January spring of 1446 finds Dame Frevisse (The Squire’s Tale, 2000, etc.) and her prioress off on an errand of mercy that disintegrates into a murder case muddier than the road to Goring. Apparently Frevisse’s longtime nemesis Morys Montfort, now corrupt escheator for the king, got fatally overinvested in his duties settling an inheritance fight. But why would he have been stabbed in a nunnery’s infirmary garden, a place for healing women? When Frevisse arrives on the heels of Montfort’s relieved family, she is housed across the street from St. Mary Priory with feisty widow Lady Agnes, party to the wrangle over her grandson Stephen’s legal rights. Not only is Stephen’s legitimacy at issue; his affections are torn between his child bride Nichola, presented as part of a land package, and his paramour Juliana, a lusty young widow who should be supporting her mother on the other side of the property battle. Montfort’s clerk, Master John Gruesby, comfortable only when he’s invisible, now alone knows the secret of Stephen’s birth, but still can’t bring himself to act. So nothing in this tangled case comes clear until a second bloody death.

Readers hungry for pace and suspense be warned: Not even Frevisse cares enough about Montfort’s death to energize the investigation before a climactic spurt. Frazer’s pleasures are bleak and inward, leavened by such unexpected jests as a character named Rose Bower and an inquest Dogsberry would have loved: “We judge he was killed shortly before the body was found.”