A traveller dies after eating a poisoned pie at a tavern south of Tonbridge, and the discovery of wolfsbane raises the possibility that the wrong man may have been killed. Sir Josse d’Acquin begins to untangle the victim’s identity and the household around the inn, while Abbess Helewise lends the judgement and medical knowledge of Hawkenlye to the inquiry.
The trail leads from roadside hospitality into the Wealden Forest and a web of concealed relationships, resentments and intended victims. Set in Richard I’s England, the novel makes poison, herbal knowledge and the vulnerability of travellers central to a mystery in which the apparent circumstances of death prove deliberately misleading.
