LAST WEEK The Times alerted readers to a competition to write a horror script. There is still a full moon to go before deadline if you wish to submit. But if vampires and werewolves are too blood-curdling for your taste, the V&A offers an intriguing alternative. It tempts the artistic to take part in a detective story instead.

Today, in the dim light of the long tapestry room, it opens a tantalising display of manuscript illuminations by the leading French miniaturist Jean Bourdichon.

His book of hours, painted at the end of the 1500s for Louis XII, invites stooping spectators to spy into an enticingly sensual realm: into a world of worshipping monarchs and porcelain-skinned Madonnas, of contented merchants and toiling country folk, of austere evangelists and explicit sirens. Light flickers and plays across these bejewelled miniatures bringing their vignettes to sparkling new life.

As testimony to its beauty, this book was cut up, its leaves dispersed among connoisseurs at least 100 years before such desecrations became fashionably common; before the diligent Ruskin recorded in his diary: “Cut up missal this evening — hard work.”

What follows is a story that is set on English soil. Money and royalty and politics all mix in a plot that includes anyone from the scholarly Samuel Pepys to the eccentric William Beckford; that involves anything from mistaken attributions to Nazi war loot.

It is a mystery tale that Janet Backhouse, the British Library curator, began to untangle some 30 years ago. But, even as she painstakingly reassembled the pages that now go on show, she fell suddenly ill. The last draft of an accompanying essay, bashed out on an old typewriter from her hospital bed, was dispatched on the eve of her death. Now the V&A invites visitors to complete her quest. Rifle through library folders, check dusty bookshop stacks, untie ribboned portfolios and open attic boxes. Search for the next clue. Who knows what secrets these pages, strewn like the fragments of some Sibylline prophecy, might together impart?

• OF ALL the splendours revealed in these exquisite miniatures the most surprising may well be a bathing Bathsheba. A far-off King David craning out of a window sees little but her veil of tumbling gold hair and perhaps, as she coyly half-turns, a tantalising glimpse of a pert rosebud nipple. But to the reader she reveals all. Not the bathing beauty as she was presented for female patrons: modestly dressed and cautiously dipping a toe. This Bathsheba is overtly erotic.

  A fascinating essay by Thomas Kren, curator of manuscripts at the Getty Museum, elaborates on the meaning and symbolism of this early and most alluring example of the painted female nude. Certainly it’s a bit of a struggle to explain her ecclesiastical significance. And, frankly, talk about penitence and purification feels about as believable as the idea that the Song of Solomon is, as the King James Bible attempts to reassure the pious, about the “church’s love unto Christ”.

  Bourdichon does not seem to foster any such illusions. The feline head that serves as a waterspout openly leers at the prettily bathing flirt. In contemporary slang, “chat” meant prostitute, Kren explains, an allusion unlikely to have escaped the book’s lascivious patron. Whatever King Louis was contemplating, apparently it was not his prayers.

• TODAY’S restless churchgoers might be amused by a copy of The Hotspur, the parish magazine of St John’s in the north Pennine village of Healey. Get a free concrete poem along with your church service times. Jamie Warde-Aldham maintains a proud Northumbrian tradition of textual embellishment as he creates a fresh — and decidedly eccentric — new format for the sort of leaflet that flops monthly on to village doormats. This month’s edition, to celebrate Chinese new year, is dedicated to the dog and includes anything from the chimerical creatures of Pliny the Elder to a essay on the canine genome.

  Is the DNA segment responsible for the Jack Russell’s irrepressibility the same gene that gives Tony Blair his cocky grin? Did you know that Le Corbusier bound his copy of Don Quixote in the hide of his pet dog? Pick up a copy before you slip into the pew. Here is a postmodern chaser to Bourdichon’s “chat”.

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