Monthly Archives: April 2010

Initially I thought of this book as "’The Name of the Rose’ meets ‘Elizabeth’", as it combines religious themes into a murder mystery set in Elizabethan England, but on reflection that’s not quite correct. This is "’Elizabeth’ meets ‘Inspector Morse’".

Not only are the victims a series of Oxford University academics, who meet progressively stickier ends, but the central character is a lonely polymath with an ambivalent attitude to authority, and his own intellectual obsessions. That and the Oxford locations are both reminiscent of Dexter’s stories, but this is very much its own historic tale, focused on the turmoil caused by the multiple violent shifts in English religion between the reigns of Henry and Elizabeth.

Read the full review