Let me recommend the fantastic follow-up to the book I recommended last year (The Burnable Book) by Bruce Holsinger. This one, The Invention of Fire, takes up the historic poet/writer John Gower a second time as the detective in late fourteenth-century London, as he seeks to solve a mystery of murders perpetrated by a newfangled technology called the handgunne. Holsinger is a professor of medieval English literature. He places Gower, a friend of Chaucer and an intimate in elite London circles, in an imagined but extraordinarily well and responsibly researched, and utterly compelling, mystery story. I loved every minute of it. It is a masterpiece of historical fiction that even a historian will not object to. Nay, this historian loved it
