A Spurious Hanging (Book) - 3/22/2018 8:14:39 AM
A Fine Murderous Mystery of Medieval Times
Put ten strong personalities with very particular motivations in an atmospheric castle with an ingenious murderer among them and see what happens. That is the wonderful hook of Dylan Devine’s A Spurious Hanging. Gathered by Sir Edmund Zander who is seeking to avenge his wife’s death, the group becomes increasingly fearful and ultimately paranoid as one character after another gets knocked off in varied and disarming manners. Devine does a fine job of shifting perspectives from one potential victim to the next as each tries to calculate both who is the murderer and how to stay out of harm’s way.
As more horrors befell characters, the shrewd and resourceful Constantine builds layers of suspense through his sordid machinations. Yet, Devine constantly keeps the reader off balance and guessing as mysteries in the spooky Framlingham Castle multiply. Set in 1426, A Spurious Hanging has a powerful elemental quality to it with a snow storm stranding the group in a castle running low on food, fire, and water.
As the population dwindles in the castle, the tension builds greater and greater until the reader is given a few last clever twists and turns right up to the novel’s satisfying climax. The Epilogue delivers gratifying clarifications that heretofore could not be explained but add further credibility to all that preceded it.
A Spurious Hanging is an engaging, bloody, historical suspense novel. I highly recommend it.
