It's my first venture into the Sister Fidelma series, and I was quite intrigued by the setting of a mystery in medieval Ireland. I enjoyed the author's nuanced ways of blending in Irish customs and the discrepancies of the churches into the story via character discourses. For a good majority of the book, the author takes his time to use the mystery as a fuel to soak us into the world, weaving his red herrings and the cast of eccentric characters. It's almost a character essay, and I enjoyed every bit of it. And then, in the third act when the other shoe starts to drop, Fidelma puts on her Miss Marple-esque hat, and all that magic just deflates.

It is, perhaps, this sudden change in the treatment of the story, narration-wise, that makes the final, customary detective-reveals-it-all speech tedious and convincing only in places. Fidelma is an astute observer and bright spirited, but I think the story could've used a more powerful manner of revelation in the end, something in line with the authorial voice that the book had at the start.