A Plague On Both Your Houses: The First Chronicle of Matthew Bartholomew (Chronicles of Matthew Bartholomew)

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I like the way that Matthew Bartholomew is out of the ordinary as a physician, not being mired in a limited medical outlook. She was one of the few cases with which Bartholomew had had success, and was lying in a bed draped with costly cloths, tired, but still living.

Unfortunately, I think I have reached my limit for a historical novel featuring a group of monks, townspeople who weren't too sure about having them in their town, and a supercilious cleric-in-charge who unfortunately appeared to me to be the perfect villain!It comes from Romeo and Juliet, and is the last words – a curse – of a character who is dying as a result of the feud between the two families. Clues are laid out nicely in the beginning and then -nothing about the mystery for awhile and the book becomes very slow, and this cycle continues throughout the book. Stephen and Swynford, two Stanmores (the fact that there are two is key to the plot), Wilson and William, Alcote and Augustus, Michael and Matthew, etc. Their families are enmeshed in a feud, but the moment they meet—when Romeo and his friends attend a party at Juliet’s house in disguise—the two fall in love and quickly decide that they want to be married.

Her plots have so many twists that she has to keep reminding the reader of where we are at but this is done in a masterly way because it is never boring or repetitive.I tried, I really did try to finish this book, but as I have read most of the Cadfael books and other historical murder mysteries in a similar vein, I think I might be a bit jaded, and therefore rather hyper-critical. At the same time, a series of mysteries deaths at Cambridge University arouses the suspicions of Matthew Bartholomew, a doctor and scholar at Michaelhouse college.

Though Camus casts his plague in the role of an efficient bureaucrat, events (like viruses) contradict this persona. This is a medieval murder mystery with an unorthodox physician acting as amateur detective as dead bodies pile up all around the University of Cambridge. The story is at times incoherent, with so many characters and plots and sub-plots crossing and re-crossing that it is easy to become confused.The scene closes with an exchange of wordplay between Capulet’s servant Peter and Paris’s musicians. The epidemic affected the course of history and was a terrifying presence at the end of World War I, killing more Americans in a single year than died in battle in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The government had red crosses painted on the doors of affected houses and the whole house would have to obey the quarantine rules – not to go out. Susanna Gregory combines the two genre in a great way, setting the story in Cambridge (an place I know well) during the 14th century and revealing the clues at just the right pace. For me, it started with Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael mysteries, which have been joined by Margaret Frazer’s Dame Frevisse and Player Joliffe series, or on the German market by Andrea Schacht’s series set in medieval Cologne.