
July 1586. Sir Francis Walsingham has dispatched Kit Marlowe to the English College, the school for exiled priests in Rheims, where he suspects the Catholic traitor Matthew Baxter is hiding - the only one of the Babington plotters to have escaped the spymaster's net. Infiltrating the college undercover, Marlowe learns that the community has been rocked by a series of unexplained and violent deaths. A scholar has fallen from a window under mysterious circumstances; the popular Father Laurenticus has been discovered dead in his bed, his throat slit from ear to ear. With the help of master codebreaker Thomas Phelippes, can Christopher Marlowe unearth a murderer, track down a traitor and extract himself from the scorpion's nest without being fatally stung?
©2012 M. J. Trow and Maryanne Coleman (P)2016 Soundings