. #12 Roger the Chapman mystery in which Roger is heading home to Bristol with a nearly empty pack, stops in a small village of Lower Brockhurst. There, he hears of an ancient mystery of two travelers who were set upon and killed but not robbed more than a hundred years previously, and a more recent puzzle, when a local beauty disappears after declaring that she will not be marrying young Tom Rawbone, but instead has been betrothed to his father, Nathaniel. Running away into a violent storm, she's not heard from or seen again. Roger, always with a nose for a mystery, is asked by Eris Lilywhite's grandmother to see if he can look with the fresh eye of an outsider and find out what happened to her. No one believes she ran away, given that she had just schemed her way into the role of future mistress of the local manor. By all accounts, Eris was not at all well liked, despite her beauty, and though the obvious suspect in her disappearance would be young Tom Rawbone, there are plenty of other people who are not at all sad to see the back of her, wherever she might have gone. With the clock ticking--as Roger has promised his wife Adela that he will be home in time for St. Patrick's Day feast--and a host of sometimes conflicting clues to sort through, Roger must come up with a solution so he can set for home. He can't help but feel that the two mysteries, decades apart, are tied together somehow.The mystery was terribly easy to sort out, but as always, I love this series for the historical sense of time and place, the author's easy-reading writing style and the characters, not so much for the mysteries themselves. Loved this one as much as previous entries!
