Where Neither Knight Nor Lady Are Quite What They Seem

The Lawless Land by Boyd Morrison
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really liked this. No question about giving it all the stars.

I'd never heard of this until we went to an a bookstore event to see Stephanie Barron and get the last book in the Jane Austen Mystery series. (So good--all of them, including this final book. My thoughts for that are here: http://inspeculation.blogspot.com/202...) Another author was there that I once tried to like but failed, though most of the attendees seemed to be there to see her. And along with them were Boyd and Beth Morrison, talking about their medieval series, now on its second book. We bought both (and got them signed, of course). Good decision.

The action is excellent, almost non-stop, but is absolutely believable all along. It reads like a fun fantasy, but it's all realistic because the research and scholarship is top-notch. That's partly because Boyd Morrison is a professional writer, but maybe more because his sister and co-author is a curator at the Getty Museum and an expert on Middle Ages documents (and lots of connected stuff, obviously). It's a great collaboration. Not only does the action ring true, but the details of the place do, too, without intruding.

Gerard Fox is racing across England and France with a noblewoman who is escaping a marriage to a horrible man, both of them protecting a secret (a good secret--an interesting secret) that her would-be husband and an ambitious cardinal want to use for their own advancement. Fox is a capable knight and Lady Isabel is a very independent woman, but they're still human and limited and vulnerable to the dangers of the time. The stakes are real. The way they use their strengths, especially their ingenuity, to fight their way through and around perils is fantastic. Action. History. A bit of Romance. Loyal friends. Amazing settings.

It's great.

I'll shortly open the second book, but I'm also gonna look up books Boyd wrote on his own, apparently set in the present. I suspect they're also a great deal of fun.

Highly recommended.

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