From Publishers Weekly
Published as a mystery, this historical novel offers a fictional explanation for the death of Elizabethan playwright and poet, Christopher Marlowe. Cook expands on real-life theories that connect Marlowe's violent death with covert missions he carried out as an agent for Francis Walsingham, one of the queen's ministers. By his late 20s, Marlowe is a model of indiscretion, subject to accusations of homosexuality, atheism and blasphemy. When Francis suffers a stroke, his brother Thomas, who is Marlowe's patron and sometime lover, cannot protect the hard-drinking, loose-tongued agent from William Cecil, Francis's successor. The plot works its way relentlessly toward murder as Cecil sets his men on Marlowe, looking for a convenient way to destroy him. With cool indifference, Cecil also has playwright Thomas Kyd imprisoned and tortured to extract incriminating evidence. Cook's reconstruction is meticulous but ultimately flat. An authority on Elizabethan England, she fictionally reconstructs the mechanics of Marlowe's death, but fails to explore Marlowe's more novelistically interesting inner demons.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This retelling of and fictional solution to the death of Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe does more than rehash an old mystery. The author so vividly evokes a bygone age that readers can almost smell the odors of cheap wine and unwashed clothing in the sordid taverns Marlowe frequents, hear the death knells tolling the onslaught of the plague, and feel the anguish of the characters. Cook, herself a dramatist and author of several books on Elizabethan theater, has so mixed actual historical events with the fictional action that it's easy to forget this is a novel, especially since references to the plague give it an almost surreal tone. (The appendix distinguishing between invented characters and those who actually lived proves most helpful.) For general readers; scholars may find it a bit too broad.
- M.E. Chitty, Fairchilde International Lib. Inst., Plainfield. N.J.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
