The Knight by the Pool is the first in the Lay Lines Trilogy, which is centred around the life and work of the 12th century French poet, Marie de France. She wrote a number of wonderful narrative poems (lays) about love and magic, werewolves and fairy lovers, jealousy, murder and humour. The Knight by the Pool begins when Marie is still the young wife of an elderly Breton lord, and when she has an encounter with a strange otherwordly knight in the forest, who tells her her fate. Later, newly widowed, she goes of to France, back to her ancestral lands, when she meets Richard the Lionheart. Many complications ensue, not the least being that nothing in Marie's past is resolved. As events begin to rapidly develop, and danger looms, she must show just what she is made of! And what her serving-knight, the silent, mysterious Welshman Llew ap Gruffydd, is also made of. The Lay Lines Trilogy is a trilogy based on the mindset of the Middle Ages: where magic and the mundane existed side by side, werewolves were as real as the ordinary kind, and the political considerations of princes were no more dangerous than the machinations of the underworld. Like the other novels in the series, it includes a 'book within a book': in this case, it's the Bestiary of Guillaume le Mage, which reveals just how medieval people saw animals, and their relationships to themselves as human beings. A wonderful, involving novel that is much, much more than a genre fantasy. ( )