Safe Return Doubtful

English Literature – Historic Fiction – Published 2025

Teesside author Glen James Brown is one of our upcoming North of England writers, inevitably compared to Benjamin Myers with this novel and its links to Durham Cathedral.

Modyr Nakett (Mother Naked in old English) was recorded as being a wandering minstrel who was paid one groat, or four pence, in the cathedral’s bursar accounts from 1433-34. He is the inspiration for this piece of historical and yet speculative fiction. Written in the medieval idiom this is a tale of class tensions, not short on violence.

The aging minstrel, the titular Mother Naked who narrates throughout, arrives at the cathedral to entertain the city’s most powerful men. He has come to tell the story of the Legend of the Fell Wraith, about a gruesome ‘walking ghost’ some say slaughtered all of the nearby village of Segerston forty years earlier. But is this a myth, or do the murders he speaks of have roots in real events.

It doesn’t quite live up to its explosive first quarter, though it is throughly entertaining and validates Brown’s place as one of the country’s up and coming young writers.

Interestingly for fellow Cumbrians, the minstrel speaks of his wandering further west, in Westmoreland, and to the Appleby Fair.

My GoodReads score 4 / 5