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'Highly entertaining' Sunday Times
It's the summer of 1604 and the Spanish are in London. Many years after the ill-fated Armada, they are negotiating a peace treaty with the English. Nick Revill's acting company is given a ceremonial role at the celebrations, but not everybody welcomes this outbreak of peace. In the shifting world of the court there are factions. In the Tower of London sits that implacable enemy of the Spanish, Sir Walter Raleigh, and he has friends on the outside who may try to sabotage the negotiations.
Nick, meanwhile, is trying to get on with his playing. Invited by Shakespeare's rival, Ben Jonson, to take part in a masque at Somerset House where the Spanish are lodged, Nick is caught up in a conspiracy. During a rehearsal the courtier Sir Philip Blake dies an apparently accidental death when he tumbles from a 'Deus ex machina' chair which is lowering him to the stage
The sixth Shakespearean murder mystery in the Nick Revill series, set during the reign of the formidable Elizabeth I.
Praise for Philip Gooden:
'Another clever criminal plunge into history' Guardian
'The witty narrative, laced with puns and word play so popular in this period, makes this an enjoyable racy tale' Sunday Telegraph
'The book has much in common with the film Shakespeare in Love - full of colourful characters . . . but the book has an underlying darkness' Crime Time
'Historical mystery fans are in for a treat' Publishers Weekly
Philip Gooden
Philip Gooden read English at Magdalen College, Oxford, and then taught at secondary school level for many years. In 2001 he became a full-time writer. Philip writes books on the English language as well as historical crime novels and mysteries. He was chairman of the Crime Writers' Association in 2007-8 and is part of the writing collective, The Medieval Murderers. He has also written the popular Who's Whose?: A No-Nonsense Guide to Easily-Confused Words, published by Bloomsbury.
Philip Gooden read English at Magdalen College, Oxford, and then taught at secondary level for many years. In 2001 he became a full-time writer. He is the author of the Nick Revill series, a sequence of historical mysteries based in Elizabethan London and set around Shakespeare's Globe theatre. Titles so far published are Sleep of Death, Death of Kings, The Pale Companion (shortlisted for the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger award in 2002), Alms for Oblivion, Mask of Night and An Honourable Murderer. A contributor to various short story anthologies, Philip Gooden also works as an editor, most recently on the Mammoth Book of Literary Anecdotes and a new edition of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World for Penguin Classics. He has also written the popular Who's Whose?: A No-Nonsense Guide to Easily-Confused Words, published by Bloomsbury. He lives in Bath where he is currently working on the first in a new series of historical novels.
More by Philip Gooden
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