S.J. Parris – She Reads Novels

I know S.J. Parris’s Giordano Bruno historical thrillers, set in Elizabethan England, are very popular, but I’ve only read one of them – Sacrilege – and wasn’t particularly impressed. When I saw that she’d started to write a new series, of which Traitor’s Legacy is the first, I thought it would be a good opportunity to give her another try. As it turned out, this is actually a spin-off featuring some of the same characters (but not Bruno himself, although he is mentioned once or twice).

Traitor’s Legacy is set in the winter of 1598 and follows Sophia de Wolfe, formerly an agent of the Queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. Now Walsingham is dead and Secretary of State Robert Cecil has stepped into his role. It’s Cecil who summons Sophia when a girl’s body is found in the foundations of a building site with a scrap of paper tucked inside her clothing. The paper contains a message written in a cipher used by Sophia during her time as a spy, suggesting that someone is trying to link her to the murder. But who would want to do that and how could the secret cipher have fallen into anyone else’s hands?

The girl is quickly identified as Agnes Lovell, a wealthy heiress and a ward of the powerful nobleman Sir Thomas North, who had been planning to marry her to his son, Edmund. It’s possible that the murder could have been committed for political reasons – North had gained a reputation for corruption during a recent military campaign in Ireland – but there also seems to be a connection with the ambitious Earl of Essex, the Queen’s favourite courtier. However, things take a more personal turn for Sophia when suspicion falls on her own illegitimate son, Tobie. Sophia will do whatever it takes to clear his name, but this is made more difficult by the fact that Tobie himself has no idea that she is his mother!

Having only read one of the Giordano Bruno novels, I’m not sure how much we actually learn about Sophia in that series. I vaguely remember her from Sacrilege and presumably she’s in some of the other books as well. It’s definitely possible to follow what’s happening in this book without any prior knowledge, but I did feel there was a lot of backstory I wasn’t familiar with and had to pick up as I went along. I didn’t find Sophia entirely believable as a 16th century woman, but not wildly anachronistic either and she’s aware of the limitations placed on her by society. I liked her as a character and enjoyed following her investigations. She’s assisted by Anthony Munday, a playwright and another former spy, sometimes working together and sometimes separately which helps the story to move along.

Many of the characters in the book are people who really existed; I’ve already mentioned some of them, but we also meet others including Thomas Phelippes, Cecil’s cryptographer, and Frances Devereux, wife of the Earl of Essex. Through the character of Anthony Munday, the novel also touches on Elizabethan London’s theatrical world and the rival groups of actors, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Admiral’s Men. There’s a lot going on, then, but the plot, although complex, is easy enough to follow and I gradually became gripped by it. I enjoyed this book and am looking forward to meeting Sophia and her friends again as the series progresses.

Thanks to Hemlock Press for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Sacrilege is the third in a series of historical mysteries set in Tudor England and featuring Giordano Bruno, a former monk who left his monastery in Italy to escape the Inquisition. Bruno is now in London working as a spy for Queen Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State and ‘spymaster’, Sir Francis Walsingham. At the beginning of Sacrilege, he is reunited with Sophia, a girl he met in a previous instalment of the series. Sophia has run away from her home in Canterbury after being accused of murdering her husband, Sir Edward Kingsley, and she wants Bruno to help clear her name.

Bruno agrees to travel to Canterbury with Sophia where he hopes to uncover the truth about Kingsley’s death and discover the real murderer, but he also has another reason for visiting the city: Walsingham has asked him to investigate rumours of a Catholic plot against the Queen. But soon after his arrival there’s another death and Bruno finds himself caught up in a conspiracy involving the remains of St Thomas Becket, the former Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered in the cathedral centuries earlier.

If you’re new to this series it would probably be better to start at the beginning with Heresy, and read the books in order. I haven’t read the previous two novels and although I was able to follow the plot of this one without too many problems, I did feel I was missing out on some important background information. The novel is narrated in the first person by Giordano Bruno, but I felt I never really got to know him, which could be partly due to the fact that I started in the middle of the series. I thought he was likeable enough, but not really the charismatic narrator the blurb had promised.

I didn’t know anything about Bruno before reading this book, but he was a real person, an Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. It was interesting to read about him after finishing the novel and discover how much of his back story given in the book was based on the known facts about his life. We do meet some of the better known historical figures of the Elizabethan period too (Francis Walsingham and Sir Philip Sidney, for example) but although they do have a role to play, during most of the story they are kept in the background while the focus is on Bruno and his investigations.

The actual mystery storyline was interesting and complex. Although things did move forward at quite a fast pace, there were also a lot of long descriptive passages and I found I had to really concentrate on these because they sometimes contained clues and information that were vital to the plot. The novel appears to have been well researched and I thought the atmosphere of 16th century Canterbury, the city and the cathedral, was evoked quite well, but it all felt just a bit too modern to be completely convincing. I did enjoy Sacrilege but I don’t think I liked it enough to want to read more books in this series.