The Devil’s Monk

Superstition clashes with reality in Fraser’s workmanlike sixth mystery featuring Constable Thomas Potts (after 2013’s Til Death Do Us Part). When a pregnant female corpse battered beyond recognition and wearing male garb is discovered near a Worcestershire haystack in the summer of 1829, locals blame the ghost of a medieval reprobate known as the Devil’s Monk. The investigation offers welcome distraction for Potts, whose wife, traumatized by a recent miscarriage, has decamped for parts unknown. After the hatchet murder of an elderly man who had information about the first crime, Potts suspects farmworker Jared Styler, a violent womanizer. Dialogue tags contain too many adverbs, and neither the resolution of the marital crisis nor the conclusion of the mystery fully convinces. But a winning new character appears in George Maffey, a military veteran reduced to legalized begging, and the accurate depiction of an oft-romanticized period will appeal to lovers of British history. Fraser is the pen name of Roy Clews, a one-time Marine commando and Foreign Legionnaire. (Aug.)