Mistress of the Art of Death

In 1171, the town of Cambridge is gripped by terror. Children have been murdered and horribly mutilated, and the townspeople have laid the blame on the Jews, who now shelter in the castle under the king's protection while resentment festers. Because a dead Jew pays no taxes, King Henry II has a stake in clearing them, and he sends to the medical school of Salerno for an expert in the new science of reading corpses.

The expert who arrives is not what anyone expects: Adelia Aguilar, a rare woman trained as a doctor to the dead, traveling with a Saracen bodyguard and a Jewish investigator. Forced to hide her true role in a country that would call her a witch, Adelia must use forensic skill, nerve, and a sharp tongue to trace a monstrous killer before more children die, or before suspicion turns on her.

Ariana Franklin's series opener fuses a modern-feeling forensic mystery with richly researched twelfth-century England, launching one of historical crime's most memorable heroines.