In fifth place this Review Season, Herds takes us back to a simpler time, one where Saxons roamed the countryside and the black plague was the hottest new piece of goss on the market. That novel is Absolution by Murder, authored by Peter Tremayne as the first entry in the Sister Fidelma series. Not just a piece of historical fiction, but also written by acclaimed Celtic scholar Peter Berresford Ellis. The story takes place at a real event that happened to real people, and mixes in fictional with non-fictional characters in order to create not only an entertaining tour of the Abbey of Whitby in 664AD but also to entice fellow historians with a piece of speculative fiction around the infamous Synod of Whitby wherein the Christian churches of Celtic and Roman peoples were forced to reconcile.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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