I've just finished the first three books in this series, which is very good, and I am now totally confused about the fourth book. This is another one of those annoying series where the books have different titles in the U.K. and U.S. So, we have:

1. Mistress of the Art of Death (same on both sides of the Atlantic)
2. The Serpent's Tale / The Death Maze
3. Grave Goods / Relics of the Dead
4. A Murderous Procession  -- does anybody know, is this aka The Assassin's Prayer?

Looking at the cover image for "The Assassin's Prayer", the text on the cover itself seems to describe the plot given in the summary of "A Murderous Procession" (and that plot summary definitely matches that title); yet the listing here says "The Assassin's Prayer" is book 5 in the series.

Argh! When are publishers ever going to figure out that these title changes just confuse and irritate people?

I'm not sure...the ISBN for it isn't even listed at Amazon, so it may very well be #5, but is the UK release. It does come up at Amazon.co.uk. Since #4 was just released here in April, it doesn't seem likely that #5 would be available in July, but if it's a UK release--which often precedes ours by several months, it's possible. I hate this also, with the names changing from country to country like that.

Cheryl

Fantastic Fiction shows The Assassin's Prayer as a freestanding novel, not part of the series...

I found some info that does connect the two books. http://www.thecwa.co.uk/daggers/2010/library.html

Franklin is up for a UK library award, and they list her bibliography as:

Bibliography - The Mistress of the Art of Death series:
Mistress of the Art of Death - Bantam Press (2007)
The Death Maze (US title: The Serpent's Tale) - Bantam Press (2008)
Grave Goods - Bantam Press (2009)
The Assassin?s Prayer (US title: A Murderous Procession) - Bantam Press (July 2010)

It seems that both the PBS listing and the Fantastic Fiction listing for "The Assassin's Prayer" are wrong, but in different ways. I'll submit data edits to get the alternate titles and the correct series numbering on all the versions.

Yep - Assassin's Prayer is the same book as A Murderous Procession!

I have the first two on my TBR, everyone raves about these books, I guess I should move them up and read them already!!