Book description
It's September 1592, and the redoubtable Sergeant Dodd is still in
London with dashing courtier Sir Robert Carey, dealing with the fall-out
from their earlier adventures. Carey urgently needs to get back to
Carlisle where he is the Deputy Warden; the raiding season is about to
begin. However, there are complications. His powerful father, Henry,
Lord Hunsdon (son of the other Boleyn girl, Mary, and her paramour,
young Henry VIII) wants him to solve the mystery of a badly decomposed
corpse that has washed up from the Thames on Her Majesty's privy steps.
Meanwhile, although he hates London, Sergeant Dodd has decided that he
will not go north until he has taken suitable revenge for his
mistreatment by the Queen's Vice Chamberlain, Thomas Heneage. Carey's
father wants him to sue, but none of the lawyers in London will take the
brief against such a dangerous courtier. Then a mysterious young lawyer
with a pock-marked face eagerly offers to help Dodd. Nobody knows who
that balding young would-be poet and lover William Shakespeare might be
working for. And then, just as Carey is resigning himself to the delay,
the one person he really does not want to see again arrives in London to
stir up everything. The Deputy Warden of the English West Marsh and
his trusted right-hand man are involved in dangerous and treasonous
plots in 1592 London. Sir Robert Carey's sidekick, Sergeant Dodd, seeks
a lawyer to sue the evil and greedy Vice Chamberlain, Thomas Heneage,
with whom Carey and Dodd have already tangled. He chooses the offbeat
Mr. Enys, but the case is thwarted by higher-ups. Meanwhile, Carey's
mother, an aristocrat who has no patience with the court even though her
husband, Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon, is the powerful but illegitimate
half-brother of Elizabeth I, arrives from Cornwall to pursue her own
pleasures. And a mystery arises: What can a body washed up on the shore
of the Thames and a priest who's been drawn and quartered have to do
with a scheme to sell Cornish land at inflated prices? Carey and Dodd
prowl the sordid and unhealthy streets of London, playing sly games with
the likes of Will Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe while getting aid from
London's King of Thieves. Dodd is anxious to return home to his wife,
but when Carey takes off to visit the Queen, he's left on his own to
sort out a tangled tale of unspeakable cruelty and treachery. Carey's
long-awaited fifth adventure (A Plague of Angels, 2000, etc.) may be too
slow-moving and complex for some readers, but the lovingly presented
historical details make it worth the slog. Patricia Finney has been a
published writer since before her first novel, A SHADOW OF GULLS, came
out when she was 18 and won the David Higham Award. She studied History
at Wadham College, Oxford and acquired an American husband who became an
English barrister (litigation specialist). After a variety of jobs
including editing a medical journal and writing a column for the London
Standard, she did freelance journalism and wrote FIREDRAKE'S EYE, the
first of her Elizabethan spy trilogy. She had three children and moved
with her husband to Cornwall in 1993. She began the Sir Robert Carey
adventures at about the same time, but a long gap between A PLAGUE OF
ANGELS and A MURDER OF CROWS was caused by a variety of distractions
including children, dogs, cats, rodents, money, other books including
UNICORN'S BLOOD and GLORIANA'S TORCH, and the illness and death from
cancer in 2002 of her husband. Since then she has entertained herself by
writing more childrens' books, a contemporary novel and many spec
screenplays, by living in Spain for two and a half years and by opening
and closing a little coffee shop in Penryn, Cornwall.
