Oxford, 1375. After a thunderstorm, scholar Richard Sabyn is found dead and is assumed to have been struck by lightning. Master John Wycliffe is unconvinced and summons Hugh de Singleton to examine the body. Hugh discovers that a death resembling a lightning strike could have been contrived, and the later death of another scholar makes coincidence increasingly difficult to accept. His search brings together experimental materials, academic rivalries and dangerous questions about what the two men were doing.
The case is set during John Wycliffe’s mature Oxford career, when he was already one of the university’s most prominent theologians and was becoming involved in royal and ecclesiastical affairs. Starr also places the investigation amid a renewed outbreak of plague in 1375, giving Hugh medical responsibilities that compete with the murder enquiry. The novel therefore joins university scholarship, early experimentation with explosive ingredients and the religious debates associated with Wycliffe to the continuing vulnerability of fourteenth-century communities to epidemic disease.
