Heresy, by SJ Parris

My thanks to Bookbrowse.com for the opportunity to read an advance reading copy of this book.

This book has not actually been released yet, but you will be able to buy (or borrow) it in February, 2010.

Heresy is a medieval whodunit, with the star of the show being (Filippo) Giordano Bruno, the Italian heretic who escaped the Inquisition in Italy, spent time in France, then moved on to Elizabethan England, where supposedly he became a spy for the crown. It is at this juncture that the story begins in earnest, with Bruno being sent by Walsingham to Oxford to look for papist plots against the throne. Bruno is happy to be there, because he will be able to search for a missing alchemical text written by Hermes Trimegistus. As he settles in to Lincoln College, one of the Oxford number is murdered in a most brutal way, and although the killer tried to make the death look accidental, Bruno realizes that it was definitely murder. After a second murder is committed, Bruno picks up a pattern, but must sift through cryptic clues and learn who to trust in this most delicate time of religious turmoil to get to the solution of the crimes.

The author's writing is good, but I must say, as far as the staging of the crimes, I had flashbacks to Eco's Name of the Rose and David Hewson's Season of the Dead (both excellent books) while reading this book. There are a lot of elements in this book that will keep Parris' readers going: cryptic messages and codes, forbidden texts, spies, religious debate and even a bit of romance are all part of the story. It moves rather slow, with a lot of historical detail & debate thrown in. It is at the last part of the book where the action picks up, the story unravels and where all is made known that I couldn't put the book down.

My understanding is that this is the first of a planned series, and hopefully the author will flesh out the ongoing characters a bit more. However, I liked this book enough to try the next one whenever it comes out. I'd recommend it to people who like CJ Sansom's Tudor era-based books, and to people who like historical mysteries in general, and people interested in the history of religion in England and Europe during the Tudor period.