Money is the root of all evil...
St Frideswide's Fair is a great annual event in Oxford, bringing together merchants and buyers from all over England and Wales, and from as far away as Flanders and France.
Yet the earnings from the fair, granted to the Priory of St Frideswide centuries before, are resented by the town, and resentment can easily turn to violence.
Under the unscrupulous Prior de Hungerford, even more trouble is brewing, and Nicholas Elyot is warned by intelligencer Alice Walsea that attendance at the fair may be used for something more sinister. When a merchant from Flanders is attacked and an English traitor is murdered, can Nicholas disentangle the crimes hidden under cover of the fair?
A gripping medieval mystery and espionage thriller, ideal for readers of David Penny, Candace Robb and Michael Jecks. Ann Swinfen was born in Akron, Ohio, on 5th October 1937, and died on 4th August 2018, in Broughty Ferry, Scotland. Educated in America and England, she was awarded degrees from Oxford, London and Dundee universities. Married to a fellow student in 1960, she brought up five children, while working variously as a computer journalist, a part-time lecturer in English, and a member of the Council of the Open University. Altogether she published one non-fiction book, In Defence of Fantasy, and twenty-three hugely successful, and mostly historical, novels, set in the 14th, 16th and 17th centuries.
