Murder in the Holy City by Simon Beaufort

Geoffrey’s father claims he is being poisoned by one of his own children, a claim no one takes seriously until he is found murdered with his own knife in the dead of night.

And they are not the only claimants for the lands that will soon fall vacant the powerful and sinister Earl of Shrewsbury has an acquisitive eye on them, as does their volatile Welsh neighbor, Rhodri of Llan Martin. Geoffrey returns home to find his father gravely ill and his older brothers and sister each determined to inherit the Mappestone estate. When the knight is killed during an ambush, Geoffrey feels obliged to deliver the message to the King himself, but quickly regrets his decision when the King orders him to spy on his own family in order to ferret out a dangerous traitor.

He is travelling in the company of a knight who claims to be carrying an urgent message for King Henry I. The second book in the critically acclaimed mystery series featuring Sir Geoffrey Mappestone In the year 1101, disgusted with the political bickering among the lords who rule the Holy City, Sir Geoffrey Mappestone returns to his home at Goodrich Castle on the Welsh border. It is not long before he finds himself drawn into dire straits involving some of the most dangerous men in the city and learns that his closest friends could also be his deadliest enemies. Ordered to investigate the deaths by his liege lord, Prince Tancred, Geoffrey realizes too late that they are somehow part of a plot to topple the most formidable lords from their uncertain hold on power. But this is not the first suspicious death in the city other knights and priests have also been killed, and all, it is discovered, with the same type of curved dagger with a jeweled hilt. Upon returning to Jerusalem one day following an exhausting desert patrol, Geoffrey hears screams coming from the house of a Greek baker and discovers that one of his closest friends, a fellow knight, has been murdered in the woman’s bedchamber. But by 1100, Sir Geoffrey Mappestone is one of the few kings who has survived the harrowing journey, the battle to take the city, and the political infighting over the rule of the kingdom. In 1097 the Pope appealed to all virtuous and God fearing men to join the Crusade to wrest Jerusalem from the Infidel.

Murder in the Holy City by Simon Beaufort