โ Scribed by Ngaio Marsh
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The village of South Mardian likes the old ways. The very old ways. This may be 1957, but South M. still features a blacksmith, a village idiot, and an elaborate fertility ritual performed at the winter solstice. There's squabbling, of course, and things come to a head (nyuck, nyuck, nyuck) when one of the ritual's main players is found be-headed, everything north of his neck having been neatly lopped off by a ritual sword. Alleyn does have to contain a certain incredulous amusement at South M.'s fetishistic embrace of the 18th century โ he does not, for example, have what one might call a real passion for morris dancing โ but he contains the giggles long enough to name the baddie and return all to the warm embrace of pre-Industrial Britain.
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SUMMARY: 02 A ritual dance becomes a murderous mambo...At the winter solstice, South Mardian's swordsmen weave their blades in an ancient ritual dance. But for one of them, the excitement proves too heady, and his decapitation turns the fertility rite into a pageant of death. Now Inspector Roderick
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