It is spring in 1380 and Geoffrey Chaucer, poet and Comptroller of the King’s Woollens is keen to leave his apartment in London and go on his annual pilgrimage to Canterbury. But instead he ends up helping his old friend Sir Richard Glanville find out who murdered his former guardian the Duke of Clarence in his old childhood home Castle Clare.

I’ve read quite a few of this author’s books and have enjoyed them all, this one included. You can expect plenty of humor as well as a good underpinning of research as Chaucer revisits the home where he grew up and has to sift through a large number of secrets and suspects. He meets an old flame, play a strange board game, take part in a pageant dressed as a shepherd and nearly gets eaten by a lion among other things – you can tell that there is a lot going on in here. Chaucer and the other characters are all well drawn, well rounded creations you care about and the background of the castle comes to life as well. If you have read the Canterbury Tales you will chuckle as I did at plenty of oblique references to them but if you haven’t it doesn’t matter, as this can be enjoyed for what it is above all – a rollicking historical mystery that I hope is the first in a series.