The Jester

The Jester is the 2003 Andrew Gross / James Patterson collaboration, an unusual outing for both writers: a medieval thriller set in 1096 France, narrated by Hugh De Luc, a tavern keeper drafted into the First Crusade who returns to find his village burned, his son murdered, and his wife abducted by Norman knights working for Duke Baldwin of Treille. Hugh becomes the duke’s court jester, hiding his identity behind motley, to find his wife and figure out what relic the duke is actually hunting.

Gross does most of the heavy lifting here, and the medieval research is more substantive than the airport-thriller branding suggests. The First Crusade chapters at the front have real grit. The court-jester sequences in Treille are well thought out (the social license a jester has to insult nobles, the way Hugh leverages it for intelligence-gathering, the carnival logic of medieval festival days). The relic-hunt plot is genre paint-by-numbers but enjoyable, and the final-act siege is well staged. Patterson’s sentence-level brevity occasionally clashes with the period register, but not enough to break the book.

Recommended for fans of medieval thrillers like Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth (in the same shelf, lighter weight), and for readers looking for books like The Jester at the intersection of crusade fiction and revenge thriller. Solid four stars, and one of the better Patterson co-author entries.