Following <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Pagan's Crusade, which, according to <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">PW, "turns medieval history into fodder for both high comedy and allegory," this episode traces Pagan and Lord Roland's travels to France, where they are forced to exorcise ghosts from Lord Roland's past. Ages 12-up. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(Mar.)

In this follow-up to Pagan's Crusade (2003), it is 1188, Jerusalem has fallen, and Pagan Kidrouck, the Arab-Christian squire, and his lord, Knight Templar Sir Roland, have returned to France, where Roland plans to ask his father and brothers to take up arms against the infidels--a very bad idea, as it turns out. Pagan relates the story in a wry, often caustic voice that adds a bit of sanity to the events that swirl around the returnees--events that are pitted by danger, cruelty, and quite literally blood and guts. Jinks dramatically evokes a historical time that was particularly dark and dirty. Roland is a knight of honor, but his relatives are louts who like nothing better than fighting, using creatively coarse language, and killing animals--and people--for sport. A subplot about Christian heresy and a homosexual proposition for Pagan extend the story even further. Along with the drama and darkness, readers will find intensity and, yes, humor. Series fans may find other books set in the Middle Ages pallid after this one.

In this sequel to Pagan's Crusade, medieval geopolitics are accurately represented, but the research takes a back seat to vivid characterizations and stink-in-the-nose descriptions of bailey life. The sarcasm and irreverence of the first book have been muted by age and sorry experience, but the fierce bond between knight and squire has only grown stronger.

In the second of a projected four episodes, medievalist Jinks sends her wise-guy squire Pagan Kidrouk and his beloved, sternly moral Knight Templar Sir Roland Roucy de Bram, from Jerusalem, which has just been retaken by Saladin, to Roland's native Languedoc. The two crusaders arrive to find the de Brams, a brutal, dysfunctional family if ever there was one, engaged in an escalating feud with the local monastery. Without slowing the plot down a whit, the author limns her 12th-century setting in extensive, usually stomach-wrenching, detail; through Pagan's eyes the castle-dwellers live in disgusting, almost comic squalor, their mores and behavior seeming all the more vicious in contrast to that of a small, pious (doomed) community of "heretic" Cathars dwelling nearby. Despite Roland's best efforts, events spiral into a series of bloodbaths that leave him and Pagan both broken-hearted, ready to take up a monastic life rather than stay in their violent world. Readers will laugh and weep along with these vividly rendered wanderers. (glossary) (Fiction. 12-15)