The King’s Corrodian

Pat McIntosh evokes medieval Glasgow, Scotland, with its smells, noises, and religious convictions to provide context for this latest addition to the Gil Cunningham series. A variation on the classic locked room mystery, Gil must discover whether man or the Devil was responsible for the disappearance of a very unpopular corrodian at a Scottish monastery. A corrodian is a secular person who has paid a monastery a fee in exchange for bed and board for the remainder of his life. Such arrangements were common at the time, and most corrodians were devout and respectful. This one was not, and most of the religious community were less than grieved at his disappearance. An outstanding medieval mystery for thoses addicted to the genre.

I believe I have read all but one book in this series and enjoyed each one. The writer draws the reader quite naturally into the time and place with details about everything from architecture, clothing and food to vocations in a smooth, seamless style. I enjoyed the feeling of being there rather than being given a tour of a strange place. The main characters and their extended family are principled, enjoyable, believable and have grown and matured as the series progressed, although not to an unbelievable degree. I am not usually happy to read a ton of dialect, but it works for this series. Pat McIntosh offers characters who are multi-faceted, only seldom creating a flat, one dimensional villain. The King\’s Corrodian has an intriguing plot, but I don\’t have the expertise to comment on how realistic it is to the time. Others will have to decide that for themselves. I recommend this book for any historical mystery fan, but do think you will enjoy it more if you begin with the first book and read them in order.

This was a very satisfying book, and I will hope there may be others to come. Gil and Alys are easy to take to your heart and their fates become important to readers of this series. I am so glad I happened on these books at the library. I bought a few of them in kindle format including these last two as they are not owned by the library yet. The books have murder and mercy and ignorance and wisdom, conflict and resolution, religion and wickedness and all in a setting and time not written about much. There is quite a lot of scariness in the dark in this book, so I would highly recommend it for Halloween reading.If you have yet to read any of this series, know that Scots is used liberally and I quite like it in \”the now.\”

The story had great period details, very good characters, and an interesting resolution to the murder. Only negatives are the constant use of Scot\’s dialect and some minor aspects of too modern view of women in some cases. The author warns in the beginning that Scot\’s dialect will be used and that words may have to be looked up. The main negative on this is using words that you have to either stop reading to look up or guess at. When I am reading I do not want to stop and look up a word. Especially one like \”keist\” which is apparently Scottish for chest. This is a case when using the word chest would have been more reasonable. The Sir Robert Carey book have a lot of Scottish dialect but not so much that it makes for difficult reading. The author is talented in her writing, but I am not sure if I will try another in the series, despite the interesting characters and well written period details.

I found the characters to be rather flat. Sorry, but as people they were just not very interesting. The plot(s) slogged along for the first seventy five percent of the novel. This was definitely not a \’page turner\’ until the last twenty five percent of the book, then it picked up nicely. The author\’s insertion of ancient Scotch and Gaelic words made reading each page slower than it should have been, for me anyway. The author does give a website for a dictionery to translate ancient Scotch words, but that was no use to me as I read this on my Kindle Fire HD and did not have access to the internet when reading. The dictionery included with my Kindle could translate less than half of the Scotch or Gaelic words.

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