Two award-winning and bestselling novelists--and authors of "This Scepter'd Isle"--collaborate once again for another enticing new fantasy set in pre-Elizabethan England.

Welcome to Épineux-le-Rainsouin, a typical French village of yellow cement houses with PVC windows and roll-down PVC shutters. Here, village gossips observe all from behind their factory-made, crocheted curtains; intensive chicken farms produce record numbers of broilers; and culture is defined by television game shows. When Didier, village employee, suddenly disappears, tongues wag: everyone knows he’s a lady’s man, too handsome, too charming for his own good. And after his body is discovered in his bath, more than one cuckolded husband sighs with relief. Equally relieved, are all the wives who knew Didier as a lover — and blackmailer. But blackmail continues, and as village secrets are exposed, it seems unlikely that Didier’s death was accidental. Before Épineux-le-Rainsouin can again settle down to its usual torpor, corruption, illegal building schemes and farming abuses, a murderer must be found.

Williams analyses and compares the ways in which African Americans and the Welsh have defined themselves as minorities within larger nation states (the UK and US). The study is grounded in examples of actual friendships and cultural exchanges between African Americans and the Welsh, such as Paul Robeson’s connections with the socialists of the Welsh mining communities, and novelist Ralph Ellison’s stories about his experiences as a GI stationed in wartime Swansea. This wide ranging book draws on literary, historical, visual and musical sources to open up new avenues of research in Welsh and African American studies.