Veil of Lies - Jeri Westerson

The cover of Veil of Lies describes it as 'a medieval noir', and I certainly can't disagree with that assessment. You have Crispin Guest, once a knight, now known as The Tracker, hired by wealthy cloth merchant Nicolas Walcote to observe if his wife is being unfaithful. Guest wouldn't take the job, but he's broke so there you go. It's not long before the merchant winds up dead in a room locked from the inside. Then people representing foreign interests begin approaching Guest because they think Walcote had a valuable relic, which they want. There's a sheriff who sort of tolerates Guest, but isn't above roughing him up at the first sign of backtalk (Guest gets beat up a lot in this book), a former street urchin who serves as Guest's sidekick, and of course, the widow herself. Young, attractive, secretive.

Half the fun of reading it for me was comparing and contrasting it to Bogart movies. The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, things like that. Westerson does a good job of transferring the conventions of the genre to a different era (the story's set in 1384). I'm curious about the use of a former knight as the proto-private detective. It gives a Guest a certain haughtiness. Even eight years after being stripped of rank, lands, and wealth, he still thinks of himself as a knight. Which means he tends to look down on people, and also speak down to them, and sometimes those people don't take kindly to it. A lot of the private eye types have a sneering cynicism that leads them to speak harshly to, well, practically everyone. Perhaps Westerson figured that for someone to speak that way to their alleged "betters" in the 14th Century, they would have needed to be in those social ranks at some point. (In the afterword, she mentions she liked having him stripped of everything but not killed, because it means that Richard II murdered Guest without actually killing him).

'Mahmoud ran the back of his hand under his chin and wiped away the blood. He chuckled. "I like men who are hard to kill. It is more satisfactory when the task is finally done.' From that line, I'm guessing Mahmoud is the 14th Century's Sydney Greenstreet.