I see most reviewers didn’t care for C J Sansom’s apocalyptic finale, but for me it redeemed a fairly pedestrian set of stories ( )

This is the fourth book of the series, written by multiple historical mystery authors. They should have stopped at number 3. ( )

Really liked the medieval stories, but the final future-set story threw-off the feel of the book. And I normally like SF. ( )

This is an interesting surmise. The 6 authors all write historic detective fiction, but they come together to write a short story featuring their own detective, but the short stories are all related. In this case they all feature a book of prophesy written be a deranged/inspired (delete as appropriate) Irish monk in the 6th Century. The book contains quatrains that predict the future of the world and this poor book gets inolved in all sorts of events as different groups want it in order to use it their own ends. A good idea, well executed. I've read several of the authors writing their full length books and I can see I might investigate those I've not read in full. ( )

WARNING: This review contains spoilers.

****

I didn't really have very high expectations for this book and was moderately okay with it for the most part, but the ending really derailed it for me. Since this book comprises six interlinked mysteries, I shall discuss each one separately.

The overarching concept of this book is a set of cryptic Latin quatrains written by a sixth- or seventh-century Irish monk named Brân (whose name without the accent always made me think of muffins), who was basically the Irish Nostradamus. Anyway, his likely-seizure-inspired prophecies cause havoc through the ages, as the six "acts" show.

Act 1 was all right. It adds the concept of someone copying out the Black Book of Brân (as it's known) and adding his own quatrain to the end to warn people that the book is basically a load of bollocks and that one should not read too much into it. This act features Bernard Knight's "Crowner John" and was actually not bad.

Act 2 did not hold my interest very much. While I appreciate the unique perspective on the 1200s or whenever it was by showing Tartars and setting the story in a very cold part of northern Europe/Siberia (sorry, I've returned the book to the library so my recollections of the book are already growing dim) instead of focusing on England, I did not really enjoy the story and thought the solution kind of came out of left field. It was a classic closed-circle mystery but damned if I would have been able to figure it out.

Act 3 actually managed to pique my interest, even though Michael Jecks did his damn "use a twee dating system involving the date in relation to feast days and years of kings' reigns, then put the real date in a footnote, instead of just PUTTING THE REAL DATE WITH THE TWEE DATE" thing that drives me up the wall. Unfortunately, the thing that piqued my interest was the fact that the victim was flayed alive. Ewwww, how horrifying. But other than that I was not really impressed. The killer came out of left field here too. Either I'm an idiot or these are not plotted very well. I'd rather it be the former, actually. It's a shame to have poorly plotted books.

Act 4's setting of Cambridge was very nice, but I really did not care about the characters AT ALL and nearly gave up on the book here. There's only so many times you can read about characters "asking curiously" and "frowning unhappily" before you snap.

Act 5 was actually quite good, comparatively speaking. I was a bit harsh on this author's act in King Arthur's Bones, but his contribution to this book was really neat. I think the plot and timing (around the time of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605) really helped sell this story for me. Easily my favourite act in this book.

Act 6 was, to be blunt, a load of tosh. Set in 2135, it is the usual hodgepodge of post-apocalyptic climate change doom-and-gloom fiction, except with a book of Irish prophecies thrown in. I did appreciate that the author didn't really add too many novel technologies, but I'm just so jaded with all of these climate change stories that I was really not impressed. It also felt very threadbare in terms of plot, and the protagonist was not very relatable, at least for me.

To sum up, I was not really enamoured of this book, but at least I borrowed it from the library. Had I bought it I would have been much more disappointed. ( )