Never Trust a Dead Man

Another one of Vivian Velde's strange books. In this case the main character is Selwyn, living in an ancient-type village. He's accused of murdering another boy named Farold and is put into a burial cave along with Farold's corpse.

Which, theoretically, should have been the end of Selwyn except for the fact that a witch named Elswyth made her way into the cave to get some materials for her spells and agreed to free Selwyn for a year's worth of service to her.

Selwyn wants to prove his innocence and he arranges for the witch to bring Farold back to life, temporarily, to find out who really killed him. The bargain is a hard one, though, for Selwyn will now be indentured to the witch for six years.

Things don't go as planned, though, and Farold comes back to life, but as a bat. At least for a while. Selwyn is disguised as a pilgrim and Farold hangs on to his hat, but that doesn't exactly work well, so Selwyn ends up disguised as a girl and Farold as her pet bird.

Which, theoretically, should have gone ok except that Selwyn has to explain what happened to the baby that he/she was supposed to have had and didn't happen to know anything about. The number of suspects keeps growing, too, getting up to eight people who had motive for killing Farold.

Then you still have to add a duck, a girl with the duck, an old mill, and a dead bird to the mix. All in all you have a good mystery with really good humor.

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