I was a member of the British Council Library in Bangalore when I was in Class X. I do not know when I let the membership expire. I took a membership again recently. Of course the biggest change between then and now is the location of the Library. Then, it was on the first floor of the Koshy's building on St. Mark's Road. Now, it is tucked away in a dead-end street off Kasturba Road, occupying the ground floor of a multistoried office building.
Last week I picked up a Matthew Bartholomew omnibus containing the first and second in a series of fourteen books, with the fifteenth due later this June. The books are murder mysteries set in Cambridge of the Middle Ages. Matthew Bartholomew is a physician teaching at Michaelhouse, a college forming part of the nascent University of Cambridge.
In A Plague on Both Your Houses, the first novel of the series, even as the town is threatened by the Great Plague in 1348, there are a series of brutal murders in Michaelhouse. Even as he struggles to contain the 'black death' in the town, Bartholomew begins to ask uncomfortable questions about the murders. His amateurish curiosity and an almost stupid courage lead him to larger conspiracies and pits him against powerful enemies who will not hesitate to kill him. That is, if the buboes do not get him first.
http://www.matthewbartholomew.co.uk/camb.htm is the homepage of author Susanna Gregory. It gives the reader interesting information about medieval Cambridge and a context to appreciate the stories better. Susanna Gregory is the pseudonym of Elizabeth Cruwys, a Cambridge academic who researches into marine pollution. She worked in a coroner's office previously.
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