The Bishop's Fever: Book Two of The Brother Matthäus Mysteries (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798188429539)

Mainz, AD 1190.

A strange illness has struck the bishop's residence. Men complain of burning pain in their hands and feet. The sick suffer visions, spasms, weakness, and terror. One canon is dead. A noblewoman has miscarried. Several wealthy households report the same affliction.

The people begin to whisper that the powerful are being punished.

As fear spreads through the city, old customs return. Charms are tied at doors. Offerings are left at a forgotten stone beyond the walls. Priests denounce pagan backsliding, merchants fear ruin, and the bishop's men demand an answer before Mainz turns against the Church itself.

Brother Matthäus, infirmarian of the Abbey of Saint Aurelian, is summoned to investigate. He brings with him Brother Lukas, a young monk hoping to learn the work of healing. Together they enter a city where every explanation is dangerous: curse, poison, contagion, bad air, divine judgment, or human greed.

Matthäus must navigate proud cathedral physicians, anxious clerics, frightened servants, a cautious Jewish doctor, a sharp-tongued scholar from Speyer, and the hidden routes by which food, rumor, and fear move through a great medieval city. As the sickness spreads from rich tables to poor households, Matthäus begins to see that the truth lies not in one body alone, but in the pattern connecting them.

Yet truth is not welcome when a city wants someone to blame.

To save the sick and prevent panic from devouring faith, Matthäus must prove that the world God made has causes - and that naming the cause of suffering may be the most difficult act of mercy.

The Bishop's Fever is Book Two of The Brother Matthäus Mysteries, a historical medical mystery set in twelfth-century Germany, where monastic medicine, cathedral politics, public fear, and hidden corruption collide.