The Last Templar by Michael Jecks
The first Knights Templar Mystery, The Last Templar, was an outstanding read that I thoroughly enjoyed. As many of you already know, I am a big fan of the Knights Templar and love to get my eyeballs on anything related to the Templars. Obviously, with a book titled like this, my interest is going to be piqued quickly.
Jecks has based his stories around the detective skills of Simon Puttock, the bailiff of Lydford Castle, and his neighbor Sir Baldwin Furnshill, a former Templar. Furnshill escaped Paris just after the last Templar Grand Master de Molay was burned at the stake. That is about all the connection to the Templars there is in this novel.
As a murder mystery, I found Jecks’s main characters to be believable and likable. I found the plot intriguing, and like all good murder mystery genre writing, it kept me guessing right to the very end. I also found the historical referencing to be accurate but not overwhelming not taxing on the readers’ attention span. Occasionally, historical fiction writers get a little too involved with the individual trees and forget the forest; that does not happen with this novel.
Out of the seventeen Jecks novels that I am aware of, I have read eleven. I am always on the lookout for the Jecks novels that I have not read because I really like the story. There is no better praise for any serial author than to have somebody read more than one book in that series. If I were Jecks, I would be very happy to have found a reader so engrossed in the stories I have drafted.
This is one series of historical fiction / murder mystery that I would recommend to any reader. I have always thought Jecks’s writing style was close to Ellis Peters but I am going to have to go back and read a few of Peters’ books again just to be sure.
Happy Reading,
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