Execution

“From the moment the perceptive and courageous Bruno agrees to go undercover, the story fairly races along, filled with murders, kidnapping, political intrigue, ciphers, romance, and a spot of torture. Those who enjoy a ripping yarn as well as history buffs who demand accuracy in the details will be satisfied.”

"Intrigue, subterfuge, machinations and assassinations, plus power struggles between queens: sounds like a great weekend of reading right there."

“Excellent. This is historical mystery fiction at its finest.”

“A masterful work that deserves a place on all public-library historical-fiction shelves, and that should be recommended to Phillipa Gregory fans.”

“Hugely enjoyable. It’s played straight, but never humourlessly so, and there’s just enough 'proper' history amid the intrigue to keep purists on side.”

“One of my favorite authors, and she is unquestionably our greatest living writer of historical thrillers. Few novelists inhabit a setting - any setting - with such confidence and command; fewer still devise plots of such cunning and craft. If Hilary Mantel, John Le Carré, and Michael Connelly were to join forces, they might gift us with a novel as atmospheric, intelligent, and addictive as Treachery - or indeed any of Parris’s books featuring monk-turned-spy Giordano Bruno.”

“An evil bookseller and a terrifying brothel lie ahead; what’s not to like? Gripping and fun.”

“With its twisting plot and vivid scene-setting, Treachery confirms Parris’s growing reputation as a writer of historical thrillers.”

“Parris’s Giordano Bruno series has been a joy. Her Elizabethan England is loud, pungent, and blessedly free of some of the genre’s more egregious clichés. She wears her research lightly: at home with the detail of the period, she is quite happy to engage in a little creative anachronism to bring the story home.”

“There are echoes of C. J. Sansom’s here. Her prose is taut and compelling. Her wielding of the historical material is always convincing but never overwhelming.”

Giordano Bruno, the Italian philosopher-sleuth in this sumptuous series, goes undercover as a Jesuit priest to thwart the assassination plot before it can bring down the monarchy and throw the nation into anarchy.

But first, he must solve the exceptionally cruel murder of a much-loved woman whose abused body is discovered in an abandoned graveyard, “a pit of sluts, criminals and suicides.” The ferocity of that killing is fair warning of what’s ahead: scenes of prison torture (think: “strappado,” “scold’s bridle” and “the heretic’s fork”), culminating in a public execution so intense that it might cause one to toss one’s cookies.