Stephen Attebrook, a crippled knight facing poverty and ruin, seems condemned to a quiet life when he takes a position as deputy coroner in the small town of Ludlow. But instead, he plunges into a web of murder and intrigue. A death Attebrook rules an accidental drowning turns out to be a murder, and he must find the killer with little evidence pointing the way. Then a commission to return a runaway apprentice pitches him into the midst of a conflict between a rebellious earl and King Henry III that is about to erupt into civil war. Caught up in the twilight struggle among spies readying for...

October 1262 should have been a quiet month, that melancholy time following the death of summer dedicated to the chores of readying Ludlow for the onset of winter and the hard months ahead. But the game of spies is afoot. A valuable list identifying the secret supporters of both King Henry and his rival for power Simon de Montfort has disappeared following the murder of Henry's master spy in the west of England. Whoever possesses that list obtains a significant advantage in the open war that is soon to break out between them. Stephen Attebrook, the part-time deputy coroner for northern...

November 1262 is an unlikely season for war. But war nonetheless is coming to the March, the wild borderland between England and Wales. Not the war that most fear between the supporters of the King and the rebellious barons uniting around Simon de Montfort, but with Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the Welsh warlord who styles himself Prince of Wales and who has united the fractious tribes of his land against the English. The English are uncertain, however, where and when the blow will fall. So, Sir Geoffrey Randall, coroner of Herefordshire, dispatches his deputy, the impoverished knight Stephen...

December 1262 is one of the harshest in living memory. A series of terrible blizzards strikes England, falling with particular heaviness on the March, the blood-soaked borderland between England and Wales. The blizzards have one salutary effect in that they drive the Welsh under Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, who had attacked all along the March, back to their fortresses, but otherwise it is still a time of suffering, misery, and death, with sensible people shivering about the fire in their homes. How much death, however, is not fully known until there is a sudden thaw on Christmas Day, when the...

Eustace FitzWalter, Giselle de Hafton, and Robert Attebrook could not be more different. Eustace is the bastard son of an earl, Giselle the sheltered daughter of a dotting gentry father, and Robert the son of an impoverished village carpenter. In ordinary times, their lives would not intersect. But when Robert breaks his uncle out of Earl Roger FitzWalter's gaol, he sets in motion a series of events that sends their lives colliding in a maelstrom of murder and revenge that drives them all outside the laws and customs of England. Step into the tumultuous years of the Twelfth Century, and stand...

Ludlow is a pleasant country town where not much happens except for the occasional murder or an attack by the savage Welsh, whose favorite pastime is the plundering of English villages when they are not fighting among themselves. Then a strange series of events strikes in what should have been a placid spring of recovery from the depredations of the Welsh - silver stolen from secret hoards in the dead of night while people were sleeping, a dead boy whom no one knows found in a glover's back garden and a dead man floating in the privy pit at the Broken Shield Inn. On top of this, one of...