A Play of Heresy has officially arrived! (I know that some of you are still waiting for the postman to bring your copy, but I hope the wait will be worth it.)

I am very pleased to announce that we’ll be celebrating the release of the book — my 24th and the seventh in the Joliffe series — with a virtual book tour starting on December 10th. Each day we’ll be focusing on a chapter from the book and I’ll be featuring little behind-the-scene essaylets here on the website.

If you want to join the conversation — or just eavesdrop on the proceedings — you’ll want to follow the virtual bookclub at all three of its “hubs”: Here on the website, at my Facebook fanpage, and on my new Twitter account. If you want to jump in on the latter, we’ll be using the #MFbookclub hashtag for the proceedings.

– Margaret

Look what arrived in the mail today! A Play of Heresy is officially being released on December 6th, but I received a box full of advance copies. They’re very handsome volumes indeed.

A FESTIVAL OF MURDER…

In the early summer of 1438, Joliffe and his fellow players have arrived in Coventry for the theatrical festival of Corpus Christi Day. Employed by one of the city’s rich and powerful merchant guilds, they plan to present two of the many plays which will extravagantly depict all of God’s Story in a parade of pomp and pageantry.

But even as they prepare to perform the Nativity, Joliffe may be called on to play a wise man off the stage as well. When the merchant Master Kydwa goes missing and is presumed dead, the cunning Bishop Beaufort calls on Joliffe’s skills as a spy to uncover the mysteries of Coventry’s elite. As suspicion falls on his own companions, Joliffe is drawn into the devilish machinations of a secret sect of heretics bent on destroying the Church. The players may be forced to present the harrowing of Hell, but will Joliffe be able to unravel a confession of corruption before Coventry’s dark enigmas unleash a medieval massacre of the innocents?

Trade Paperback – Kindle – PubIt

PRAISE FOR THE JOLIFFE MEDIEVAL MYSTERIES

“If you are an historical mystery fan…you’ll want to rush out and get this wonderful series … Entertains and confounds with its intricately plotted mystery and richly detailed writing…” – The Romance Readers Connection

“Brings the period to lush life… Such richly imagined mysteries come around too rarely.” – Roundtable Reviews

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must stagger back to my tryptophanic coma.

– Margaret

If you’ve living in the UK, Germany, France, or anywhere outside of the United States or Canada, The Novice’s Tale is now available for the Kindle! It can also be read on any iPad, Android, Windows PC, Mac, or Blackberry device using the free Kindle Reading Apps for those platforms.

Unfortunately, I don’t know when an e-book of The Novice’s Tale will be made available in the United States or Canada. I don’t control those rights, so it’s up to the publisher to make those decisions. This will also, unfortunately, limit your ability to buy the e-book from other booksellers. But The Novice’s Tale — like all the novels and short stories I control the rights to — is offered without DRM, making it very easy to convert to whatever formats you like best.

UNHOLY PASSIONS AND DEMONIC DEATH…

In the fair autumn of Our Lord’s grace 1431, the nuns of England’s St. Frideswide’s prepare for the simply ceremonies in which the saintly novice Thomasine will take her holy vows. But their quiet lives of beauty and prayer are thrown into chaos by the merciless arrival of Lady Ermentrude Fenner and her retinue of lusty men, sinful women, and baying hounds. The hard-drinking dowager even keeps a pet monkey for her amusement. She demands wine, a feast…

And her niece, the angelic Thomasine.

The lady desires to enrich herself and her reputation by arranging a marriage for the devout novice. She cares nothing for the panic and despair she leaves behind her.

But all her cruel and cunning schemes are brought to a sudden end with strange and most unnatural murder.

As suspicious eyes turn on the pious Thomasine, it falls to Sister Frevisse, hosteler of the priory and amateur detective, to unravel the webs of unholy passion and dark intrigue that entangle the novice and prove her innocence… or condemn her.

Buy Kindle Edition

PRAISE FOR THE NOVICE’S TALE

“Frazer uses her extensive knowledge of the period to create an unusual plot … appealing characters and crisp writing.” – Los Angeles Times

“A fast-paced and seamless story.” – St. Paul Pioneer Press

In helping to ready The Novice’s Tale for release as an e-book in the UK, I had to read it for the first time in almost twenty years.  I last read it in galley proofs not long before it was published.  My very first galley proofs!  For my very first published novel!  Sixteen more Dame Frevisse books have followed, as well as Joliffe’s series and a number of short stories – keeping me busy going forward rather than looking back. So reading The Novice’s Tale now, after so long, was a strange experience.  Here, when all those other books and stories were not even a glimmer in the back of my mind, was where all of them had begun.  It’s good to know that reviewers have declared the series started well but grew stronger and better as it went on, but that is not the same as going back myself to where it began – to find so much I had forgotten from a story not read in almost two decades, and how much was familiar from the days I had afterward spent with Dame Frevisse and in St. Frideswide’s.

If you are making Frevisse’s acquaintance for the first time, welcome.  If you have kept company with her for a long while and are now revisiting the beginning with me, welcome indeed.

– Margaret

A Play of Heresy is scheduled to arrive December 6th!

A FESTIVAL OF MURDER…

In the early summer of 1438, Joliffe and his fellow players have arrived in Coventry for the theatrical festival of Corpus Christi Day. Employed by one of the city’s rich and powerful merchant guilds, they plan to present two of the many plays which will extravagantly depict all of God’s Story in a parade of pomp and pageantry.

But even as they prepare to perform the Nativity, Joliffe may be called on to play a wise man off the stage as well. When the merchant Master Kydwa goes missing and is presumed dead, the cunning Bishop Beaufort calls on Joliffe’s skills as a spy to uncover the mysteries of Coventry’s elite. As suspicion falls on his own companions, Joliffe is drawn into the devilish machinations of a secret sect of heretics bent on destroying the Church. The players may be forced to present the harrowing of Hell, but will Joliffe be able to unravel a confession of corruption before Coventry’s dark enigmas unleash a medieval massacre of the innocents?

Preorder Trade – Preorder Kindle

PRAISE FOR THE JOLIFFE MEDIEVAL MYSTERIES

“If you are an historical mystery fan…you’ll want to rush out and get this wonderful series … Entertains and confounds with its intricately plotted mystery and richly detailed writing…” – The Romance Readers Connection

“Brings the period to lush life… Such richly imagined mysteries come around too rarely.” – Roundtable Reviews

A Play of Heresy will be the seventh Joliffe book (for a total of 10 appearances including those in the Frevisse novels).

– Margaret

Over the past few months I’ve gotten many e-mails from Nook owners all asking the same thing: When will your stories be available for the Nook?

And the answer to that is: Right now. We got the Frevisse e-books up a few weeks ago and I’ve just received word that the conversion process has been finished for all of my e-books and they’re now available for sale at the Barnes & Noble website. Going forward, the Nook and Kindle versions will be getting released simultaneously whenever that’s legally possible.

 

(click any cover for its Nook page)

Kobo Owners: I know many of you are also waiting for these titles to be available through the Kobo store. Unfortunately, we have no idea when that will happen. Although you can buy the e-books available from Berkeley, Kobo has not made the other Frevisse e-books available despite the fact that they were submitted weeks and/or months ago. I have no control over this, and I recommend writing directly to Kobo if you want to see any action taken on it. It is within their power to offer the books; they simply haven’t done so.

However, the older Frevisse e-books (the ones that I have control over) are currently available through Smashwords. And if you buy them through Smashwords, you’ll be able to download them in a wide variety of formats, including the ePub format which will allow you to read them on your Kobo. (In fact, the formats available on Smashwords should let you read the books on any e-reader you might own.)

We’ll be converting the rest of the novelettes and short stories to Smashwords in the near future, and I’ll post an update here when that happens.

My tech person also tells me that we do not use DRM at any of our digital outlets, which means that it should be relatively easy to convert file formats. (Although, honestly, I’d be lost if you asked me to do it.)

– Margaret

“Lowly Death” has been released for the Kindle and Nook. It can also be read on any iPad, Android, Windows PC, Mac, or Blackberry device using the free Kindle Reading Apps for those platforms.

A CUNNING AND CLEVER GREED…

Come down the Paternoster Passage, cross the church’s yard, and knock on the doors of Master Whittington’s Almshouse. Master Pecock, a man of the cloth and the greatest detective of 15th century London, will answer your call.

Just as he answers Dick Colop’s call. The mother of young Colop’s friend has slipped, fallen, and died. But something doesn’t feel right about it. There’s a strange uneasiness creeping at the back of Colop’s mind.

And then there was the matter of the candle.

It was in the kitchen. A burned down stub of a candle. It had rolled under a table. And left a thick splattering of wax on the floor a foot or so away.

That was enough. Master Pecock was on the scent. The scent of lies. The scent of wrongs. The scent of murder.

Kindle Edition – Nook Edition

“Lowly Death” is the third tale of Bishop Pecock, coming after “Heretical Murder” and after “The Simple Logic of It”. It was first published in Murder Most Catholic, edited by Ralph McInerny. Master Pecock has advanced in his priestly career and is now head of the well-endowed Whittington Almshouses in London.  Rather than the tendrils of national crime, here he deals with a domestic matter.

The plot came – as so many of my plots do – from an actual medieval situation.  I will often be innocently reading some scholarly study or else the documents themselves, when something catches at the criminally-inclined corner of my mind and I suddenly ask, “Yes, but what if…” and away I’ll be, the twisty mind of a mystery writer turning what – in the document – was a perfectly straightforward business matter into a full-blooded (and usually bloody) convolution of human relationships and situations. And when I look back from the finished story to the innocent document that started at all, I’ll often be surprised at how far the transmutation of imagination has taken the original few facts.

One small but continually niggling thing stays with me from this story: The editor’s note at the beginning of the anthology.  There Mr. McInerny stated that, although the story “uses medieval setting for color, it remains a thoroughly modern deductive mystery”. In fact, the methods of deduction used in the story are perfectly medieval, drawn directly from the methods of deduction outlined by Master Pecock himself in his own works of circa 1450, wherein he urged people to seek truth through the use of reason and demonstrated how to do it, very much in the way he uses logic and reason in this story.

– Margaret

“Heretical Murder” has been released for the Kindle and Nook. It can also be read on any iPad, Android, Windows PC, Mac, or Blackberry device using the free Kindle Reading Apps for those platforms.

BETWEEN DUTY AND BLOOD…

Questionable matters? Strange deaths? Mysteries most foul? The cleverest man in 15th century England lives at Master Whittington’s Almshouse! Turn right off College Hill Street, go through the narrow Paternoster Passage, and knock on the third door on the left.

Dick Colop, student and scrivener, knows those directions well. They take him to the quiet study of Sire Pecock, priest of the Church and scholar of both man and book. A man has been cut down in the busy streets of London. The sheriff thinks it nothing more than a tavern brawl, but Colop knows that he never made it through the door.

A terrible accident or something worse? Sire Pecock will follow the dark and murderous ways of heresy to find the truth of sin.

Kindle Edition – Nook Edition

“Heretical Murder” was originally written for the Mammoth Book of More Historical Whodunits. (Which was published as the Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits in England; which is not to be confused with the previous volume of the exact same name which contained a completely different set of stories including “The Witch’s Tale”.  I take no responsibility for the vague ways of publishers.)

I don’t remember why the allowed word-count for this story was so high, but I took full advantage of it to write a story that roamed through the streets of London, keeping company with one of my favorite people from the 1400s – the scholar and churchman Reynold Pecock (otherwise called “Reginald” by modern scholars).

He had crossed my path more than once in my years of research and reading but never caught my interest until I attended a session at the International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and heard two scholars – Stephen E. Lahey and Brent Moberley — discussing Bishop (as he became) Pecock.  Talking with them afterwards, I confessed that, rather than a legitimate scholar, I wrote medieval murder mysteries.  After what I read as a startled pause, they both declared with delight that Bishop Pecock would make a great detective.

Somewhat taken aback by the idea but intrigued by what they had been saying about him, I set to taking a longer, deeper look at Reynold Pecock, even going so far as to read some of his religious treatises in Middle English.  I found him a delightful, interesting, complex man and knew I had to use him in a story or – better yet — stories.
This particular one is chronologically the first of the three short stories in which he figures and finds him early in his career in London after a long while as a scholar and teacher at the University of Oxford.

The uprising that is a background to this story is historical, and it may be worthwhile to note that although the use of the word “pamphlet” forty years before the introduction of printing to England may jar with some readers, it is not an anachronism.  It is the actual word used in a contemporary chronicle regarding Lollard activities in London at this time.  More than that, the copying of books was indeed a commercial enterprise in London at the time, and a family named Colop was prominent in it.

– Margaret

LaVonne Neff, a very nice woman who also wrote Dame Frevisse: Someone You Should Know, has written a very charming review of Winter Heart.

This was originally meant to be part of the Winter Heart Blog Tour, but technical difficulties delayed things considerably. (Sorry about that, LaVonne!) So this can be thought of as a somewhat belated epilogue to the tour.

This audio book of Die Novizin (the German translation of The Novice’s Tale) has actually be available for awhile now, but I’ve only recently sorted out my author’s copy of it. With that in hand, however, I’m able to offer this sample from the beginning of the book courtesy of Youtube:

Due to unfortunate circumstances, I will NOT be appearing at the Historical Novel Society Conference in San Diego, CA. The panel I was hosting (Keeping a Series Fresh), however, is still happening. Medieval mystery author Priscilla Royal has graciously agreed to take over the hosting duties. I’ve turned over the materials I had prepared to her, and I think the panel should still be a great deal of fun.

Keeping a Series Fresh
Saturday, June 18th, 2011
8:30 – 9:30 AM

My apologies to anyone who is unduly inconvenienced by this. I would have dearly liked to go, but it just wasn’t possible this year.

– Margaret