Mistress of the Art of Death

Cambridge, 1171. Children are being murdered, and suspicion has fallen on the town's Jewish community. King Henry II, unwilling to accept a convenient accusation and anxious to restore order, asks the ruler of Sicily to send a medical expert capable of examining the dead. The doctor who arrives is Adelia Aguilar, trained at Salerno and forced to conceal the full extent of her knowledge in an England where an educated woman can easily be accused of witchcraft.

With her companions Mansur and Simon of Naples, Adelia follows physical evidence through Cambridge's churches, streets and river paths while hostility towards the Jews threatens to turn the investigation into wider violence. Her methods bring her into contact with royal officials and with Rowley Picot, whose loyalties are not immediately clear. The murder inquiry becomes a portrait of Henry II's England in which royal authority, religious prejudice and emerging medical knowledge collide around a killer who is still hunting children.