When Crispin Guest sees a body plunge from London Bridge into the Thames, he doubts the official conclusion of suicide. The dead man is an armourer, and an old knightly acquaintance is desperate to find an object the armourer was said to possess: the Spear of Longinus, the legendary weapon that pierced Christ’s side. Geoffrey Chaucer’s arrival and his own clandestine business draw the case closer to political intrigue, while further deaths convince Crispin that the relic is being pursued for very earthly reasons.
The story uses late-fourteenth-century London’s mixture of trade, chivalric memory and intense relic culture. Armourers belonged to a skilled urban economy that served nobles and soldiers, while legendary objects could be treated at once as devotional treasures and instruments of worldly power. Chaucer’s presence again connects Crispin’s street-level enquiries to the networks of royal service around Richard II. Westerson’s central tension is characteristic of the series: Crispin respects belief, but as an investigator he must ask who benefits when belief becomes a weapon.
