Voilà un livre bien compliqué à lire, une nouvelle fois l'auteur ne peu s'empêcher d'étaler son savoir sur l'histoire de l'église chrétienne naissante, les familles au noms compliqués, les lieux aux noms quasi impossibles à prononcer... on s'y perd, pour ma part, j'ai lu quelques passages en diagonales, en ayant assez de toutes ces "précisions" historico-généalogiques... Je crois que je vais arrêter de lire les "thrillers" de cet auteur, je m'étais déjà dit ça en achetant l'avant-dernier ! ( )

Tough slogging through this one. First I must say that I'm a huge Fidelma fan. I have read all of Peter Tremayne's Sister Fidelma books, and I usually love them. Tremayne's mastery of his subject and his knowledge of the erra (1st Century Ireland), plus his innate storytelling ability have kept me coming back to this series again and again. But I must say that I found this one tough to get through. I found there was far too much ancient Catholic religion rhetoric in this book. And even too much ancient Ireland history mixed in with it. I got totally lost and worst of all it made me lose interest in the story. It seemed the book dragged along until about the final quarter, and then it finally picked up and was more like the Fidelma stories that I have come to love. There is a lot of death and dying in the book, but that is not unusual for these books, but the reasoning behind the destruction was murky and remained murky throughout the book. In fact it was quite convoluted, and made no sense at times. I still gave the book 3 stars though because I love the way Tremayne has developed his characters. Fidelma and Eadulf are one of my favourite crime fighting duos. ( )