phillip[ c. wright

The Black Death—the first volume in the series Not Without Mercy, tells the story based on historical  events, of William Beorn, a successful merchant and ship builder in Bristol England in 1348 who finds himself at the dawn of the world’s most perilous outbreak, the Black Plague . 

William struggles to save his wife Jillian, their adopted son Michael and the rest of his family and friends from the inevitable devastation of Bristol, and the probability of becoming one of the casualties of the plague which took the lives of twenty five million people, over one third of Europe’s population.

The Black Plague caused moral malaise throughout the land that grew greed, selfishness, insecurity, fear, brutality and wickedness. It caused the fearful to become faithless, and the faithful to become fearless. The Church grappled to explain it at the same time its clergy was either dying or hiding from its parishioners for fear of contamination and death.

William, Jillian, Michael and those in the midst of the great conflict each dealt with the adversity and uncertainty differently, for some it was the end, but for others, it was the beginning as they discovered that God had left them, Not Without Mercy.