Oh yeah, more medieval murder mysteries

The Medieval Murderers are a group of writers who, you guessed it, write medieval murder mysteries. There are a series of books, with a rotating cast of authors and characters. Each book is based around a theme, and each author writes about the theme (or object, or whatever) in his or her time period. In this book, all of the stories revolve around what may be the relics of King Arthur – which are sacred, especially to the Welsh.

The bones are initially discovered in 1191 in Glastonbury – they’re believed to be Arthur, because they appear to belong to a very tall man, and there’s a lock of blonde hair with them (Guinevere’s?). There could be a fight over whether to display or hide the bones, depending on whether the monks sympathized with the Welsh cause, or were loyal to King Richard (Lionheart). King Richard would love to prove that Arthur was truly dead, and not just sleeping in a cave somewhere waiting to rise up and conquer the land again. A group of Welsh sympathizers steals the bones and gives it to the Guardians who will keep the bones safe in Wales.

The bones make their way around Wales and back into England, encountering William Shakespeare in 1606, and may be used to guard England against invasion by Napoleon. The stories are wrapped up in 2004 at the Tower Bridge in kind of a cool and fun way, and with a good call back to the beginning of the stories.

The quality of the stories is a little spotty, but even the worst of them are still entertaining. All of the stories are quick reads, and if you read more than one of the books, you will become familiar with some of the characters (if you read any Michael Jecks or Bernard Knight, you’ll already be familiar with some of the characters). Like the stories, some of the recurrent characters are better than others.