Published by Time Warner Books / Sphere, 2003, 488 pages.

Cambridge, 1354. “The winter that gripped England was the worst anyone could remember. It came early, brought by bitter north winds that were laden with snow and sleet. The River Cam and the King’s Ditch—usually meandering, fetid cesspools that oozed around the little Fen-edge town like a vast misshapen halo—froze at the end of November, and children made ice skates from sheep bones.”

The cold is devastating, and people are falling ill and dying. Matthew Bartholomew—a physician who teaches at the College of Michaelhouse, run by Benedictine monks—is rushed off his feet. Many of his patients are poor, and are especially hard hit by the cold.

But winter is not the only killer stalking the people of Cambridge. Norbert Tulyet—a spoiled, self-centred young man who attends college only because his family pays to have him there—is found dead in front of his college gates, first stabbed and then hit on the head. Soon Bartholomew’s close friend, Brother Michael, who is the Senior Proctor, has persuaded Bartholomew into helping him solve the murder.

Then Bartholomew and Michael find another body, this time in their church. The dead man seems to be a beggar, judging by his clothes. He is tangled up in the mouldy robes hanging there, and it isn’t clear whether he was hiding, trying to get warm, or whether the body was hidden there by his murderer.

Cambridge also has some unwelcome visitors. Philippa—a woman to whom Bartholomew was once engaged and who left him for a rich merchant—is visiting with her husband, Sir Walter Turke. The couple are staying with Bartholomew’s sister Edith, so he cannot avoid meeting them. And then there is a long-toothed stranger who claims to be in town to sell his badly written tracts on fish. But Michael is convinced he is up to no good.

The body in the church turns out to be Turke’s servant. But why was he dressed in beggar’s rags instead of the livery befitting someone who worked for a rich master? And when Turke goes skating on the lake and falls through the ice and dies, it looks like an accident. But the skates are badly tied, and Philippa insists that he never skated. Was it really an accident or was he forced onto the lake?

Susanna Gregory writes vividly, bringing the period to life—you can feel the cold and smell the streets. You learn about how people lived, what they ate, and the politics, especially the running battle between town and gown. By making Bartholomew a medic, Gregory highlights the clash between the beginning of modern medicine and the old ways of healing (which often involved horoscopes, leeches and bloodletting). Bartholomew is also an early forensic scientist, and his habit of examining bodies to determine the cause of death is viewed as suspicious by most people.

The characters are vividly drawn, and over the series, you begin to feel that you know them well. Gregory makes the story more interesting by giving some of her characters the names of people who actually existed. Every book in the series ends with a historical note where she explains who these people really were.

This is the ninth in the Matthew Bartholomew Chronicles—Gregory has written 25, of which I’ve read 21 so far. I love these books because they are utterly immersive, and there is something irresistible about medieval monks and murder! However, I chose to write about The Killer in Winter because it is the first one I read in the series, many years ago. (I have since reread it.)

On my last visit to Cambridge, I was disappointed to find that no one I spoke to had heard of Susanna Gregory. So I am posting this in the hope that more people will discover this writer. For those who know Cambridge, the series will transport you back in time to discover what this university town was really like in the 14th century.

This is one of my favourite crime series. I would recommend not starting with the first, A Plague on Both Your Houses, because it is set during the bubonic plague epidemic, and Gregory goes into quite a lot of detail, which might be hard to take if you’re squeamish. You might want to come back to it later, as I did. But do read these—they deserve to be better known!

Note: Read the piece I had written some years ago about the series as a whole.