Gil is studying to be a lawyer, with little or no prospects of property his plan is to enter the priesthood as well. While watching the May Day celebrations with an anonymous young woman, unbeknown to Gil he sees a murder & their victim pass in front of him.

Later as Gil begins to investigate the murder he also gets to know the anonymous young woman better.

I liked the story, I liked the characters. I will admit that I became impatient towards the end & bored with the narrative, so I skipped much of it. I knew who the murderer was....

I found the map in front of the book to be severely lacking as it didn't have all the landmarks on it. ( )

This is a historical mystery set in Glasgow in the 1400s. Gil Cunningham is a newly qualified lawyer, almost ready to join the priesthood. But one year, shortly after May Day, he turns detective: a woman has been found murdered on a building site at Glasgow Cathedral, and Gil is asked to investigate. Maistre Pierre, the master mason in charge of the building site, lends his assistance, as does Pierre’s daughter, Alys, whom Gil finds fascinating on many levels.

I’m a bit tired of historical murder mysteries these days, but the setting was enough for me to give it a shot. I liked it well enough — it felt a bit slow in places, although that could have been because I was reading it as an e-copy through Overdrive and the formatting was horrible. But I did like that Gil and Pierre and Alys solved the mystery together, and there was a nice Gaelic element, and the dialogue wasn’t *too* faux-medieval. I’ve put the second book on my to-read list. ( )

A Tale A Bit Long In The Telling

It took me almost a third of this historical mystery to really settle into the story. To begin with, the writing is so richly descriptive that I almost couldn't follow the narrative. The Harper's Quine by Pat Mcintosh features meticulous research and intelligent writing but the mystery unfolds very slowly and passively so that I didn't find it as exciting as I'd hoped. It's a whodunit solved by a great deal of time-consuming and methodical detection.

Although by the end, I was well acquainted with the main characters, I found it initially very hard to distinguish between the various side characters. My confusion continued to the closing chapters unfortunately.

The author has an excellent knowledge of the workings of the medieval church, law, everyday life, Scottish environs and the era.

As many other reviewers have mentioned, it would have been ideal to append a glossary for the archaic Scots and Ersche vocabulary not found in the modern dictionary. It was a real shame to miss out on the meanings of these words and phrases which couldn't always be gathered from their context.

Even though the standard of writing is high, I am not all that motivated to follow Gil and Alys Cunningham through the next 8 books in this series based on the pace and progress of the storyline. ( )

Six-word review: Well-intentioned first novel misses the mark.

Extended review:

This novel possesses a considerable amount of charm and some promising narrative potential. The setting is Glasgow in 1492, and the details of ordinary life in fifteenth-century Scotland are entertaining enough, complete with glimpses of social conditions, economics, politics, education, ecclesiastical life, language, clan rivalries, and even dentistry. The historical elements appear to be well researched, and the landscape through which the characters move is vividly depicted.

The problem is that this story is almost entirely lacking in narrative tension. There is no driving passion of any kind, the focal character has nothing at stake, there is nothing to fear, no important character is ever in any danger, and even the romantic component of the story proceeds without obstacle or impediment apart from an extremely minor tiff. I don't remember ever reading something called a "murder mystery" that felt more lacking in suspense in any regard; I could barely muster any curiosity about the solution. The overall effect is about as ho-hum as a white dinner roll served cold.

Moreover, there are too many characters with too little to distinguish them, and the legal business is difficult to follow. So when it comes to what is essentially a courtroom drama in the last portion, I hardly knew what was going on. I could see that the author had something like a "Where's Waldo" vision of a roomful of people each engaged in some pertinent activity, but it was too much to track all at once. The "whodunit" question is almost a matter of indifference, apart from a natural desire to see justice done, and the way that justice is done here seems arbitrary and contrived.

I did enjoy the language effects throughout, even though the author didn't trouble to interpret many instances of tongues other than English or even explain what "Ersche" was (I eventually figured it out). I knew a good many of the Scots expressions--e.g., bannock, usquebae, kirk, burn--but there were others unfamiliar to me, and context clues were often insufficient. There were also utterances in other languages, including Italian, that seemed important but that were left untranslated. For instance, after speaking with an Italian musician, a character reports, "I ask about his knife. He says he drew because he thought he saw something--an uomo cattivo, a ladro--in the kirkyard." Because this seemed like a significant statement of a witness at the time, I'd have liked to know what a "ladro" was, but the author did not see fit to reveal it--even though according to the text this statement was made by the person who was translating the Italian's remarks for the main character.

In sum, the proportion of weaknesses to strengths seems too high for me to give this book better than a half-hearted rating, even though I came to it optimistically and wanted to like it. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed this. The settin gwas convincing, and what must have been detailed research was used with a light touch and a clear sense of affection for the background. characters were well-drawn and sympathetic, and the hero particularly interesting in his scholarship and indecision about his future. I found the conversations witty and realistic and the plot was complex and convincing. Anyone concerned by the Scots or Gaelic terms will find they are smoothly explained in the text (along with the Latin, French and Italian!). I'm very much looking forward to the next in what I believe is already a long series. ( )