BookBrowse Reviews Nicked by M.T. Anderson

It's the year 1087, and the Adriatic port city of Bari, Italy—like much of the rest of Europe—has been overrun by a pox outbreak. In the absence of medical knowledge, the people, fearful and helpless, look to God for deliverance from suffering and death. The Benedictine monks are instructed by the archbishop to keep vigil and to pray to Nicholas, the saint known for so many miracles that he is called Nicholas the Wonderworker. One in particular, a monk named Nicephorus—possessed of "an irritatingly pure and generous heart"—has a dream in which the saint himself exhorts the monk not to wait, instead to "leave our nest."

News of Nicephorus's dream quickly spreads, and the city leaders immediately interpret it to mean that a ship should set sail from Bari to Myra, in what is now Turkey, to steal the saint's body from where it has rested for six centuries and to ...