I was pretty happy with this book at the beginning – A Wolf At the Gate, by Lexie Conyngham, offered pretty good prose, along with evidence of some serious research on Viking Age life. But as I read on, I grew less happy with it.

Ketil, the apparent hero of the book, is in the service of Earl Thorfinn of Orkney (which sets the story in time a little later than my Erling books). Ketil generally operates outside of Orkney, and he’s about to sail away, but the earl calls him back to investigate a murder. Ketil solved a previous killing for the earl, so he’s assumed to be good at that sort of thing.

Secret murder is rare among the Norse, and this murder is all the more puzzling because the victim, a man in the earl’s service named Steinar (recently back from Colonia in Saxony, which I take to mean Cologne) seems to have been universally liked. He was a devout Christian, rather strict about church rules, but harsh only with himself. Someone split his skull with an axe in front of his own house.

I said that Ketil was the apparent hero of this book, because he is in fact just the Inspector Lestrade here. The real detective is a woman named Sigrid, a childhood friend of Ketil’s who now lives as a widow in Orkney. She was the one who actually solved the previous murder. Gradually she and Ketil renew their friendship – there’s some suppressed attraction there, but both of them deny it. Together they consider the multiple puzzles that face them – does the murder of a man just back from Colonia have anything to do with the fact that an abbot from Colonia is visiting the island? Does someone covet Steinar’s beautiful wife? Or was the killer Ketil’s follower Lambi, who seems to be a sneak thief?

The further I read in this book, the more disappointed I grew. First of all, the characterizations were fairly flat, especially the male characters. Author Conyngham seems to have a problem I’ve often noticed in books by women – she doesn’t get men at all. There’s a famous line (unjust but funny) in (I think) the movie, As Good As It Gets, where Jack Nicholson, asked how he writes women so well says, “I think of a man. And I take away reason and accountability.” Conyngham writes men by thinking of a woman, and taking away any clue.

Also, the story began to bore me. Although the plot gets sweetened by further murders, I never felt any sense of urgency, any idea that great things were at stake.

Also, the narrative falls into what I believe to be serious factual falsehoods about the Christian church. It’s not an anti-Christian book as such, since most of the serious Christians are depicted sympathetically. But the author states and reiterates – and this is a major plot element – that the Catholic church denied baptism to the children of slaves, and to deformed babies.

I had never heard of this before. It entirely contradicted my own understanding of the matter. Now maybe author Conyngham, whose biography says she’s a historian, knows something I don’t know. But my online searches find documentation directly contradicting these contentions.

On the issue of slaves, this article from Christianity Today, by Rodney Stark, is behind a paywall. But the passage I need is right there above the barrier —  “That the Church willingly baptized slaves was claimed as proof that they had souls, and soon both kings and bishops—including William the Conqueror (1027-1087) and Saints Wulfstan (1009-1095) and Anselm (1033-1109)—forbade the enslavement of Christians.”

I also found numerous references online to the historical fact that the early Christians made it a practice to hunt through the dumping sites where the Romans – quite legally – habitually discarded their unwanted babies. The Christians would baptize these infants, adopt them, and raise them in the church. One of the primary excuses the Romans gave for “exposing” babies this way was that they were born deformed.

So in the end I was both bored and irritated by A Wolf At the Gates. Too bad. It showed promise.