Prophecy is the second Giordano Bruno book and Stephanie Merritt's style has become much more assured. This novel is much stronger on plot than the first (Heresy) - I found it gripping all the way through. The historical background is beautifully done. The detail is rich and many layered and made me feel that I really was in Tudor London. There are no 'obvious' touches - the research doesn't show at all.
Giordano Bruno - heretic and ex-monk - is a guest at the French embassy in London at the request of King Henri of France. He finds himself at the centre of a conspiracy to put Mary, Queen of the Scots, (currently imprisoned at Sheffield Castle) on the English throne and restore a catholic monarchy. Bruno, paid by Walsingham to spy for Queen Elizabeth, finds his position very uncomfortable. A young maid-in-waiting to the queen has been murdered with strange astrological symbols carved upon her body and all the evidence points towards the supporters of Mary Stuart. Soon, Bruno's own life is in danger. When the ambassador's wife returns from Paris and makes it clear that she wants Bruno's body - very much alive - in her bed, his loyalties are also put to the test.
This is a five star read for lovers of historical crime fiction. I can't wait to read the new book - Sacrilege - out at the end of April.
As a lover of detective fiction I’m always ready to read something new. Heresy ticked a lot of boxes. I’d just encountered the sixteenth century Italian Giordano Bruno in another context - the world of Florence and the Medici. He was once of the most advanced minds of his time - proposing the heretical theory that not only did the earth and other planets circulate round the sun, instead of vice versa, but that there were other planetary systems out there and other universes. Like a lot of early Einsteins he was burnt at the stake by the Catholic Inquisition while still a young man. In S.J. Parris’s book, he is in England at the court of Queen Elizabeth - one of the known facts of his life - a friend of Sir Philip Sydney and on the payroll of Walsingham, to spy out Catholic recusants. He is also following the trail of a Forbidden Book, originally looted from a library in Alexandria and now being black-marketed around Europe. On a trip to the University of Oxford to debate his theories of the universe with more conventional minds (and look for the book) he becomes involved in solving the brutal murder of the sub-rector of Lincoln College. This is not Umberto Eco, but it is a good read. It began a little slowly for me - 100 pages of lead-in - and some of the metaphysical conversations could have been edited down, but once the bodies began to turn up, murdered in gruesome and unlikely ways, the pace picked up and I found myself gripped by it. I didn’t mind the real Giordano Bruno being translated into a fictional detective as much as I expected. S.J. Parris handles the mingling of fact and fiction beautifully. The historical period is rendered well too, without the intrusion of gratuitous detail. S.J. Parris is better known as Stephanie Merritt, the deputy literary editor of the Observer, and already has two novels to her credit, Gaveston and Real. I think she has a winner on her hands here - the Elizabethan period is a very fertile source for novels of intrigue, betrayal and assassination. Giordano Bruno would be astounded by the direction that his afterlife has taken, but he makes a very interesting hero, as this interview with the author demonstrates.
