The Sword of Shame by The Medieval Murderers

The effect of all the parallels between the two books is less eerie deja vu than Groundhog Day. Like THE TAINTED RELIC, THE SWORD OF SHAME is divided into five 'acts', a 'prologue', and an 'epilogue', and thematically suggests a medieval morality play. This conclusion is strongly reminiscent of the final auction-house scene of the group-created episodic film THE RED VIOLIN, which, as I noted in my review of THE TAINTED RELIC, follows the same formula as the Medieval Murderers have done. As in the previous book, the sleuth characters find out that the sword is cursed, but it still proves tempting to centuries of luckless criminals.įinally, it finds its way to a London auction in 2005. They are an English Romulus and Remus, marring newborn England with filial murder just as the mythical twins did in Rome.įrom 1066 on, the sword's possessors betray and are betrayed kill and are killed. This time, the item that travels through the centuries is a sword that was forged before the Battle of Hastings and used in that historic conflict - by two brothers, who kill each other with it. Unfortunately, the Medieval Murderers' second book tediously mirrors the first. THE TAINTED RELIC is a wonderful sampling of their work, tightly strung together by a riveting plot involving a cursed shard of the True Cross that causes a millennium-long chain of tragedies.

They include Susanna Gregory (and her other pseudonym, Simon Beaufort), Ian Morson, Bernard Knight, and Phillip Gooden.

The Medieval Murderers are a group of commercially and critically successful crime fiction writers, all working in the sub-genre of historical fiction. THE SWORD OF SHAME, by the Medieval Murderers, is an anthology of seven short stories written in the same style as their previous one, THE TAINTED RELIC.

The Sword of Shame by The Medieval Murderers