My hold for A Twisted Vengeance came while I was in the UK, so I managed to read this while actually visiting York! While I didn’t manage to wander around, book in hand, reading this while in a Tudor-period house made the book come alive and made me fall more in love with the series – so prepare yourself for some gushing ahead.

A Twisted Vengeance is the second book in the Kate Clifford mysteries. It picks up shortly where The Service of the Dead left off, with Kate’s mother in York. Kate and her mother have a rather strained relationship, but when one of her mother’s beguines (a poor sister who, unlike a nun, can work for her living) is attacked and in self-defence fatally wounds her attacker, Kate is drawn into the picture. And it’s not just out of affection – if word of what happened gets out, it could harm Kate’s own business as well.

As with The Apothecary Rose (an Owen Archer mystery by the same author), this is an England heavily influenced by the Church. It’s not Christian fiction, but again, I saw and appreciated how Candace Robb managed to portray the ways religion affecting the politics of the day and the lives of their citizens. In particular, the situation of the beguines was something new to me, and I want to read more about them now – the author’s note has more information on them and I’d recommend reading it if your interest is piqued.

Apart from the beguines, the book also mentioned Wycliffe. I’d been listening to a podcast about the influence of Wycliffe just before reading this book, and that helped me to appreciate more about the theology of the time.

When it comes to history, A Twisted Vengeance continues to delve into Kate’s past, which involves England’s tense relationship with Scotland. Since I just came back from Scotland and heard plenty about its history on tour, I managed to appreciate more fully just how dangerous those times would have been.

I mention all these not to brag about how much I know now, but to show the amount of research it must have taken to write a historically accurate mystery novel. It’s pretty clear that Candace Robb has put in a lot of effort to understand the period of the time and the position of York and considered the ways that these external conditions would affect her characters’ thoughts and behaviours. And to be clear, there aren’t pages of exposition about the history with Scotland and Wycliffe. There’s a bit of explanation about the beguines since they are controversial, but for the most part, the three examples I’ve raised are worldbuilding details – small things that I would have missed if I had not just learnt about them. All these small things add up to a novel that feels true to the time period, and I deeply enjoyed all the small details.

This book has not only left me wanting more of the series, but now I want to read more about this period between the Plantagenet and Tudor dynasties. If you have any books to recommend, please let me know. In the meantime, I can’t wait to finish the books I bought and continue on with the Kate Clifford mysteries.