The Cockcrow Curse

The 'captivating and unusual' Chaucy Shire Medieval Mysteries series continues with The Cockcrow Curse, the highly anticipated sequel to The Heart of Darkness. Escape to late medieval England once more and spend a summer in the beautiful but dangerous little shire of Chaucy. Rowena's change of circumstances was entirely unexpected. But as verdant summer comes to the fields and forests of Chaucy Shire, her blossoming world is pierced by a sudden and mysterious trouble. The unknown forest-dwellers who saved her life in the winter snows have called for the help she promised was theirs in repayment if ever they had need of it. With Sir Richard still suffering the effects of a knee wound, she and he reluctantly ride to the rendezvous in Glymewood Forest. Thus begins a trickle that soon turns to a torrent of trouble. Farms at the fringes of wild Glymewood are being attacked in violent night raids, travellers on the forest roads robbed, and what is worse, the Keeper of the Forest insists he has jurisdiction there, the forest being royal hunting land under the Crown's brutal forest laws. Sir Richard is furious, and the people look on in expectation. Is it too much to expect 'the black sheriff' to be their saviour? Everything points to the unknown forest-dwellers being guilty. But Rowena cannot believe the men who saved her from certain death to be thieves and murderers. Yet there is a man she can believe to be one: squire Gliglois, a young man who unexpectedly arrives late one night claiming to be a distant Hastings relation. Everything about the beautiful young man is unsettling; his icy eyes, his mysterious nocturnal rides, his uncanny resemblance to Sir Richard and strange interest in the knight's sister. Bad as they are, these are only some of the rapidly mounting difficulties facing Eaglestone Castle's new mistress. Then Rowena looks out one fine morning to see a wholly new trouble waiting in the meadow - a trouble that shatters her world and threatens to part her from the man she loves forever. Rowena must stand alone and find more strength than ever before if she is to bring him home and bring peace to Chaucy Shire once again...