The latest addition to the celebrity detective list is none other than Dante Alighieri, newly installed Prior of the city of Florence, who is searching for shards of evidence in The Mosaic Crimes by Giulio Leoni.
It is June, 1300. Ambrogio, a master mosaicist has been found tortured and murdered, his face covered with quicklime.
While making enquiries about the dead artist, Dante is welcomed by the Third Heaven, a group of scholar-philosophers who discuss theology, philosophy, and question the workings of the powerful and mysterious Knights Templar.
The Knights Templar have always been a popular source of speculation, but certainly much more so since The Da Vinci Code.
Lore and legends of The Templars surface throughout the Medieval West Country Mysteries by Michael Jecks.
In the series opener, The Last Templar, when a spate of burnings occur in a quiet 14th century Devon village, Bailiff Simon Puttock is grateful for the help of a recent arrival, reticent Sir Baldwin de Furnshill.
Sir Baldwin turns out to be an ex-Templar who managed to escape the Pope's murderous purge of the order.
Still devoted to the vows he once took, by working with Puttock he finds a new way to combat the evil in the world and ensure justice to those denied it.
Jecks also participated in two collaborative mysteries, The Tainted Relic and Sword of Shame, with a group of fellow medieval mystery writers including Simon Beaufort, Susanna Gregory, and Bernard Knight under the collective pseudonym The Medieval Murderers.