By Paul Carrier
When readers search out tales of high-stakes sleuthing in Tudor England, there is no shortage of crime fiction that fits the bill.
C.J. Sansom has written a series of novels whose protagonist is the fictional Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked lawyer. In a similar vein, author Stephanie Merritt, using the pen name S.J. Parris, has transformed real-life 16th-century philosopher Giordano Bruno into a skillful detective.
Now comes Oliver Clements, who has released two novels featuring polymath John Dee, scholar, occultist and court astronomer to Elizabeth I, doubling as a secret agent.
In the first of these, The Eyes of the Queen, the wholesale butchering of Protestants in France in 1572 — what came to be known as the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre — serves as a springboard for a fast-paced thrill ride on both sides of the English Channel.
Amid mounting fear in England that Catholic Spain may be poised to invade in a quest to free the imprisoned Mary Stuart, dethroned queen of Scotland, and place her on the English throne, a lone Catholic zealot may have a plan of his own to assassinate England's Protestant queen.
The Eyes of the Queen is the very definition of a page-turner awash in twists and turns, albeit with some graphic violence.
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