Crispin Guest leaves London for Canterbury after the archbishop asks him to discover who is threatening sacred relics associated with the cathedral. The assignment brings an uncomfortable reunion with Geoffrey Chaucer and a group of pilgrims whose stories, rivalries and secrets echo the world later immortalised in The Canterbury Tales. When murder reaches the cathedral precincts, Crispin and Jack must look beyond outward piety to identify a killer among clerics, travellers and supposedly respectable companions.
Canterbury was one of the great pilgrimage destinations of medieval Europe, centred on the shrine and cult of Thomas Becket. By placing Crispin among pilgrims, Westerson can explore how travel, devotion, hospitality and commerce converged around a holy site during Richard II’s reign. Geoffrey Chaucer appears as a living courtier and writer rather than a monument of English literature, linking the fictional investigation to the mobile world of royal service and pilgrimage from which his own writing emerged. The result is both a murder mystery and a playful reconstruction of late-medieval Canterbury.
