Cruel as the Grave [Paperback]

April 1193. England’s King Richard Lionheart languishes in a German prison, and treason scents the air. Richard’s younger brother, John, seizes Windsor Castle, and Dowager Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine summons her trusted personal “queen’s man,” Justin de Quincy, to do the impossible– mediate a truce with her rebel son. Amid such fateful events, the murder of a Welsh peddler’s daughter seems small. But the cruel demise of the beautiful Melangell so troubles Justin that not even a threatened French invasion can keep him from investigating her death. Yet can he bring Melangell’s craven killer to justice?“Penman writes about the medieval world and its people with vigor, compassion, and clarity.”
–San Francisco Chronicle

“Penman’s lively, articulate prose brings to life history as it could have happened–high praise for a historical mystery.”
–Houston Chronicle

“Sharon Kay Penman tells her stories with passion and a strong sense of time and place.”
–MARGARET FRAZER
Author of the Sister Frevisse Novels

“Once you enter Penman’s world, you’re hooked.”
–Seattle Post-IntelligencerSharon Kay Penmanhas lived in England and Wales and currently resides in New Jersey. She is the author of six other novels:Falls the Shadow,Here Be Dragons,The Reckoning,The Sunne in Splendour,When Christ and His Saints Slept, and the first Justin de Quincy adventure:The Queen’s Man.TOWER OF LONDON, ENGLAND

April 1193

They were intimate enemies, bound by blood. Here in the torchlit splendor of the Chapel of St John the Evangelist, they’d fought yet another of their battles. As always, there was no winner. They’d inflicted wounds that would be slow to heal, and that, too, was familiar. Nothing had changed, nothing had been resol£(