Now his appetite is raging. Fruit will have to suffice but not just any fruit only the delicious apples that grow in the archbishop’s orchard will do. Standing on the branch with an apple within his reach he glances over at the magnificent cathedral which is being erected to the glory of God on the city square. He notices the architect, Gerhard Morart, climbing the scaffold to look down upon his creation. Suddenly a huge dark shape looms behind the builder and he plunges toward the ground.

His hunger forgotten, Jacob races over to the dying man who mutters something just before he dies. But Jacob can do no more for the black shape is now after him! Who or what is the creature and why was the architect killed? He was building a structure to glorify God and the city so why would anyone want him dead? The building was intended as a monument to stand for centuries long after he and his contemporaries are long forgotten.

The Fox is a simple man with no resources - he’s a beggar with no trade and no home, only a lean-to propped against the city walls given to him by an old woman whose own time had come. Soon everywhere he tries to hide someone is after him, either angry merchants who have good reason or this mysterious stranger who has many resources and many dark skills. When two of his few friends are murdered Jacob is really troubled. Who can he ask for help?

He seeks the young woman who helped him earlier and winds up meeting her slovenly but cheery father and his ascetic brother who is a canon of the cathedral. Father Jaspar puzzles out the problem and they set out to do justice with lots of carousing, lecturing, hiding and eavesdropping along with a fair number of dead bodies among the mix.

Schatzing does well in presenting the period his history is accurate and his descriptions believable but his translator seems to have failed him. The phrase “dead as a doornail” is attributed to William Shakespeare who lived some centuries after the events of this book. So when it appears on 13th century lip the reader is transported from one time to another. There are several such instances which break the flow of the narrative.

The story is quite good and the characters and setting well done with one great exception; Jaspar’s tendentious explanations as to why Morart was killed and the entire chain of events that led to the murder and the subsequent ones. His accounts ramble on page after page surely numbing the listener as much as they do the reader. Much of the information could have been conveyed in an author’s note and spared the reader the minutiae of 13th politics and power plays. This reviewer is a medievalist and even she found the prose turgid and became a victim of “information overload.” What a pity because there were some pleasant times spent reading as Jacob and his friends took in the spectacular Cologne cathedral.

--Jane Davis