Jacket for 'A Poisonous Plot. The Twenty-First Chronicle of Matthew Bartholomew'

Publishers

UK - Sphere

A Poisonous Plot. The Twenty-First Chronicle of Matthew Bartholomew

By Susanna Gregory

Published Jun 2015

In 1358, the college of Michaelhouse is facing a serious shortfall of funds and competition from rival upstarts such as Zachary Hostel. Their problems are made no easier by the hostility of the town’s inhabitants, who want the University to leave the town completely and resettle in the Fens.

This simmering tension threatens to break into violence when a well-known brewer is found dead in one of the colleges. Physician Matthew Bartholomew knows he was poisoned but cannot identify the actual substance never mind the killer. He also suspects that other illnesses and deaths may have been caused by the effluent from his sister’s dyeworks, but his reputation as a diagnostician is threatened by the arrival of a fashionable new medicus.

Torn between loyalties to his kin and to his college, he fears the truth may destroy both is personal and professional lives, and he knows he has very little time in which to get to the heart of the matter before many more people – townsmen and scholars – lose their lives entirely.