By Paul Carrier
England in the Middle Ages provides a great setting for a mystery. Some of the characters are sufficiently modern in outlook to be quite recognizable to 21st-century readers while others hold to such archaic beliefs that they clearly are throwbacks to a much earlier, but consistently fascinating, time.
In Plague Land, we find the young but rational (and religiously skeptical) Oswald de Lacy, lord of Somershill Manor in Kent, trying to solve the murders of two sisters while combating the rampant superstition of the locals. These impressionable folk claim a cynocephalus, or dog-headed man, is responsible for the killings. Perhaps there’s even an entire pack of these demonic creatures roaming the countryside.
The dog heads, as they are called, are mythical, but the Black Death (a term coined centuries later) is not. When Plague Land opens in the middle of the 14th century, England is emerging from a devastating outbreak of the Pestilence, aka the Great Mortality, which has decimated the population of Kent and the rest of the kingdom.
The only reason Oswald suddenly finds himself assuming the role of Lord Somershill while still in his teens is because the Black Death struck down his father and both of his older brothers while Oswald was living in a Benedictine monastery, initially as a student but later as a novice who was being groomed to embrace the monastic life.
Thanks to Oswald’s youth and inexperience, he is overwhelmed by his newfound responsibilities, making him a sympathetic character. Not only does he find it difficult to win the respect of the people in Somershill Village, but his youth places him at a disadvantage when dealing with his mentor, Brother Peter; his overbearing and somewhat daft mother; and his unmarried older sister Clemence, a bitter and spiteful woman who resents him.
“I would say the predominant difference between my novels and many other crime thrillers is the nature of my main character,” S. D. Sykes writes on her web site. “Unlike many of the hard-boiled and robust detectives we meet in crime fiction, Oswald de Lacy is a rather shy and naive 18 year old boy who is neither a natural leader nor an experienced detective. He struggles with his role as Lord Somershill, he struggles to solve the crimes, but most of all he struggles with himself.”
Oswald is not keen on playing detective, but Brother Peter tells him he is duty-bound to investigate the murder of Alison Starvecrow, whose body has been found in the woods. When her sister Matilda later disappears from the Starvecrow cottage, leaving behind a pool of blood, Oswald finds himself with two murders on his hands, and although he quickly makes an arrest in Alison’s case, the evidence is circumstantial.
Oswald is floundering. Yet he carries on, in part because he is surprised to learn during his investigation that Alison and Matilda may have been his half sisters, thanks to his late father’s philandering.
But newly discovered secrets can be deceptive, and when still more deaths occur, this roller coaster ride of novel takes enough twists and turns to keep readers racing through its pages. And I mean all of its pages, right down to the last sentence on the closing page, which offers one final eye-opening revelation.
Sykes provides a memorable glimpse of life in a medieval world shattered by the indiscriminate march of the grim reaper. The plague claimed the lives of more than half of the English people over two years, and the country’s population did not fully rebound until the 1600s. In the 14th-century England of Plague Land, poverty, fear and death are everywhere.
The gentry make do with depleted staffs whose ranks have been thinned by the plague, while the poor live in “hovels not much finer than the stall of an animal.” The village church sports a “doom painting” that provides “a vivid depiction of Hell.” Oswald even stumbles upon a “plague pit” where victims were buried en masse. It is “a layered cake of bones, clothing and hair” deep in the woods where the bodies “had been disturbed and clawed at by wild animals.”
There is at least one sequel to Plague Land in the works. On her web site, Sykes says she has finished writing The Butcher Bird, which features the same characters as Plague Land. “Once again the novel is set against the backdrop of a society coming to terms with the devastating aftermath of the Black Death,” she writes.
