The summer of the Danes

I was very excited to finally get my hands on this one. The mashup of Cadfael and a group of marauding vikings seemed as if it would be an absurd romp. Astonishingly, it's one of the least engaging of the Cadfael novels I've read.

The book starts very slowly, with Cadfael moving at Tolkienian pace deep into Wales on an errand with his old apprentice. Things seem to start getting interesting when, on arrival at the Welsh prince's court, we're introduced to a series characters each with conflicting allegiances and vendettas. Suddenly, the tension is broken by news of betrayal, a viking attack, and a corpse discovered amongst the party.

Just as the plot seems like it's coming into focus, Cadfael gets pulled away from the murder, then captured and held for ransom by the Vikings. All the while there's a weird romance bubbling and some secondary characters are making their own schemes, but ultimately nothing comes of it. A disastrous midnight battle breaks up the monotony, but most of the book is monotonous. Worse, this is another story where Cadfael does precisely zero detecting and is merely present when the murderer presents himself, with the mystery's solution as a complete afterthought.

The Danes are the most fun of this book, but they take a long time to appear, and spend much of the book sitting around not doing much of anything. We get some sleek serpent boats, and hints at medieval political maneuvering, but it all feels like half-measures. I wonder if, perhaps, the story would be stronger if taken out of the series entirely so that its own characters could stand on their own and not be shoe-horned into an existing world and format.

Even if you love Vikings, you can skip this one.