A Plague On Both Your Houses: The First Chronicle of Matthew Bartholomew (Chronicles of Matthew Bartholomew)

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The story is at times incoherent, with so many characters and plots and sub-plots crossing and re-crossing that it is easy to become confused.

However, some of the historical detail was very well done and any book that deals with the Black Death cannot help but be filled with ghoulish appeal. Like a Dickens novel, La Peste is populated by vivid characters; particularly, by over-whelmed medics and officials. That's an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is—common decency. The world can go on fighting like Capulets and Montagus, but that is the path to mutual destruction and massive collateral damage.Said as an exclamation of exasperation with, disgust for, or rejection of both of two opposing people or groups. The phrase a plague on both your houses is a famous line from the play Romeo and Juliet that involves a dying character cursing two families that caused great problems. He froze in horror as he saw someone was already in the lane: another scholar, also disobeying College rules by being out at night, was walking towards him. Elizondo as a symbol of futile labour, and the phrase ‘eyes pinned to the ritual’ is an indictment of Catholic ritual and formalism (in contrast to the ‘divine’ signs of beauty and nature).

What will follow is a very eventful mystery into which Matthew Bartholomew has to face quite dangerous and deadly encounters from these conspirators, and after a few twist and turns and solving an exciting plot within a plot, he will be able to identify the culprit(s) of these terrible murders, and finally bring some peace into a Cambridge community which is plagued all around with the Black Death. I love murder mysteries, adore books set in Abbeys and Monasteries and a murder mystery set in an Abbey, well couldn’t be better, a dream come true or so I thought. His narrative existentialism offers us, too, in these plagued pandemic days, a potent literary resource as we face our sense of physical vulnerability and need, perhaps, to re-examine the foreshortened horizon of everyday life.The scene closes with an exchange of wordplay between Capulet’s servant Peter and Paris’s musicians. I'd say half of the one star I didn't give this book is because I like the mystery to be tough to figure out while I'm reading, but I want to be able to actually understand it once it's been revealed at the end! In 1348, the inhabitants of Cambridge live under the shadow of a terrible pestilence that has ravaged Europe and is travelling relentlessly eastwards towards England.