Alys Clare

Winter, 1211. King John's reign is harsh, and his tax collectors wring money from people near to starvation. Homeless, desperate men are reduced to walking the streets, begging for handouts, and the nuns at Hawkenlye Abbey, now under John's iron rule, are all but powerless to help. Former abbess Helewise decides to move back to her cell near the abbey, to better help the needy, putting a strain on her tentative relationship with Sir Josse D'Acquin....

When her cousin Morcar is attacked while fishing for eels near Ely Abbey, Lassair is sent to the Norman occupied island to nurse him. As the secret hidden within the walls of the abbey claims more victims, Lassair is forced to face a challenge that she fears is far beyond her.

1st in a new series featuring Lassair, a 14-year-old girl with special gifts training to be a healer in a Fenland village, in 11th century England.

In Autumn of 1093, Lassair encounters a veiled noblewoman on the quay at Cambridge, set on by an angry mob. She has no idea that the woman, alone but for her infant child, brings both mystery and peril. Then a devastating flood hits the fens, and among the wreckage washed up Aelf Fen is a body. Lassair, in the company of a sheriff's officer, wonders if she is dealing with murder. Meanwhile, in the south, Lassair's beloved Rollo is moving with relief...

Apprentice healer Lassair isn't too alarmed when a travelling peddler relates a grisly tale of a red-bearded giant breaking into a woman's home and caving in her skull like an eggshell; peddlers, she has observed, tend towards the dramatic. But her attitude changes when she learns that the dead woman is a distant relation. The incident makes Lassair's family uneasy, for the intruder seemed to be searching for something. What could it be? Lassair has...

Lassair awakes in the morning in 1092 with the feeling that something in the spirit world is trying to reach her. When Lassair learns that a nun has been murdered at the same nunnery where her sister lives, Lassair sets out to investigate.

A Hawkenlye medieval mystery - May 1199. Abbess Helewise has been summoned by Queen Eleanor to discuss the building of a chapel at Hawkenlye Abbey. Meanwhile, Sir Josse d'Acquin is on the trail of a group of mysterious knights rumoured to be devil worshippers. As Helewise heads for home, Josse follows his quarry to Chartres, where he meets the last person he expects: Joanna. And she has grave problems of her own . . .