The Difficult Saint (Catherine LeVendeur Series #6) » (Unabridged, 1 CD, 11.5 Hours)

Sharan Newman won Romantic Times magazine's Career Achievement Award for Historical Mystery in 1999. She lives in Oregon.

This novel in Newman"s series of medieval mysteries featuring Catherine Le Vendeur takes place in the twelfth-century amidst Europe"s religious and political turbulence and intolerance. Catherine, wife of one-handed Edgar, daughter of a Jewish merchant, and mother of two small children, is a Christian convert. Agnes, her estranged sister, has returned to Paris with the news that she is to marry a German lord. She wants no part of her Jewish family, except the sizable dowry her father can provide.

After Agnes departs for Germany, her family receives terrible news: Agnes"s husband has been murdered by poison and Agnes herself is the prime suspect. Catherine, putting their differences aside, goes undercover in the dangerous anti-Semitic climate of Germany to save her sister"s life and possibly lose her own in the effort.

Publishers Weekly

This sixth entry in the Catherine LeVendeur series of medieval mysteries (Cursed in the Blood, etc.) leans more heavily on history than mystery as Newman makes 12th-century Paris, a period of religious and political strife and much intolerance, a rich stage for her cast. Catherine, wife of one-handed Edgar, mother of two small children and daughter of a Jewish merchant, Hubert, is a Christian convert. When her estranged sister, Agnes, unable to accept her father's Jewish origins, contracts a marriage with a German wine grower, Lord Gerhardt of Trier, the family schism threatens to become both wider and more permanent. But Gerhardt's death, under circumstances that strongly implicate his new bride as either murderess or witch, sends Catherine and her family on an arduous trek to Germany to win Agnes's freedom by proving her innocence or another's guilt. The mystery develops slowly, which allows the reader to savor the customs, practices and beliefs that inform the lives of the French, German and English; of nobles, merchants and knights; of Jews, Christians and schismatics. If Newman doesn't deliver a particularly suspenseful plot, she compensates with her command of the period and her ability to translate her knowledge into an absorbing and entertaining narrative. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.