Product Description

1593: Elizabethan London seethes with political and religious intrigue, while across the sea thousands perish in the flames of the Spanish Inquisition. On the surface Roderigo, the Queen’s physician, is a loyal subject of the Crown but secretly he and his family are Jewish conversos, hiding their illegal religion. Rebecca, Roderigo’s daughter, is torn between her duty - which includes a loveless marriage to a converso - and her fascination with the heady world of Elizabethan London. Slipping out of her household one night, disguised as a man, Rebecca stumbles into a swordfight with someone equally romantic and heedless: Will Shakespeare, an ambitious young dramatist who, like Rebecca, has secrets to conceal and mysteries to unravel. Together, they embark on an adventure that plunges them into the sinks and stews of Elizabethan England - and into the course of history itself...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #336597 in Books
• Published on: 1997-11-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

About the Author
Faye Kellerman lives witth her husband, novelist and psychologist Jonathan Kellerman, in Los Angeles.

Customer Reviews

Don't do it
If you were to choose this particular book as in introduction to Faye Kellerman you would probably never read another one of her books again. Just don't bother with this one as it is really not worth the time I spent wading through it. I am a fan of both Faye & Jonathan Kellerman and presumed this would be of the same high standard. Disappointing, innacurate and even laughable.

This ain't Peter & Rina but worth it just the same!
This is a great yarn that is completely different from Faye Kellerman's other work. I approached this book with caution having read the scathing reviews given by other readers, and am glad I did.If I want accuracy of depiction I will go to the text books, if I want a good read I go to my favourite authors. This is an romping Elizabethan love story/intrigue. Just relax, and try not to take your fiction too seriously - reading should be for pleasure alone sometimes!

Dire rubbish . A waste of 500pages!
I came to this novel, having read all Kellerman's other detective novels, fresh from a deep study of Lady Antonia Fraser's biographies of Henry VIII, Mary, Queen of Scots, her Essay of Elizabeth the First, Charles I, and Cromwell. This regrettably prepared my mind with an accurate portayal of Tudor/Jacobean life in England, especially twowards the end of Elizabeth's life in the 1587 period (of the novel).

One thing I've noticed, with irritation, is that Kellerman loses no opportunity to drop in some comments about Judaism or Jews, and she positively gushes if she has an opportunity to use Hebrew! Strangely, her husband (presumably as committed a Jew) makes far less of this in his by far superior writings. Faye Kellerman has a chip on her shoulder about being Jewish, and I can't tell from her writing is she's a proseletyser or and apologist; whichever, it's damned annoying and gets in the way of the plot.

And yet, here we are in Tudor England and Kellerman finds an excuse to make Jewishness a central theme of this story, along with a highly unlikely love affair with William Shakespeare.

Her Jewish hero, captured, is put to the torture; yet Kellerman seems to have little knowledge of the Statutes dating from Edward IVth's time regarding use of torture (for example an individual may only be tortured twice, except by Royal preprogative, and even then only if "high crimes against the State are suspected"), or that only two devices were in use; the rack and the manacle. She happily adds thumscrews, body-crushing cages, and al manner of things which were in use in Spain by the Inquisition.

Her description of Shakespeare's trip to the north was spoiled, because whilst Hemsdale is a good Derbyshire/Yorkshire name and a possibility, the presence of red sanstone in that area is not, for it's overlaid by granite and limestone pavement.

Altogther too many factual errors in this over-long and over-rated book. Mrs Kellerman REALLY sgould take a close look at her husband's novels, for they are superior in every way.