Constructed to house ladies protecting the present Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine in the twelfth century, St. Jude’s Abbey is not like any other, and its inhabitants are not regular nuns. In fact they are not nuns at all, but ladies sent by the Queen to learn the art of becoming warriors.

Isabella de Montfort is one of those ladies. But her focus is not in the knightly arts but in science, particularly her special talent: explosives. Laughs abound in her antics of trying to build a replica of an explosive developed in the Far East.

In My Lady Knight, Isabella de Montfort is sent on a mission to help the Queen, who is imprisoned by her own husband. The mission? To recover papers that will help end the war between her two sons, Richard and John, for the throne. The abbess has requested that Isabella seek out her nephew John le Courtenay to assist her along her journey, for the roads can be treacherous.

John le Courtenay has come to claim the remains of his best friend lying outside the walls of a monastery and bury them on his lands. He has no interest in helping Isabella, only in avenging his friend’s death. But when Isabella finds a dagger with a strange symbol on it that is linked with the Queen, they are forced to work together to find out to whom it belongs and why it was placed in the grave.

The relationship between Isabella and John starts too early in the book and in the middle of a battle, which to me seems unwise. The passion just doesn’t seem to be there between them, and it seems that author Jocelyn Kelley puts them in situations where it doesn’t seem likely that anything will happen between them, yet it does. Aside from that, My Lady Knight is a wonderful glance at the era of King Henry II and the people who lived and fought for and against the Queen.