The Inquisitor’s Niece
Alonso Malki is a convert to Christianity whose father has been condemned by the Inquisition for relapsing into Judaism. Fearful that his father’s sentence will ruin his career, as well as bring the attention of the authorities to his own studies, he leaves Seville to go directly into the lion’s den and petition Cardinal Cisneros.
Luisa, the daughter of a minor noble and Cisneros’s cousin, is being married off to one of the Cardinal’s protégés, an illegitimately born scholar. She initially admires her husband’s eloquent writing, but their marriage is doomed by his hidden desires. When Luisa falls into melancholy, she is visited by the learned doctor Alonso, and promptly falls in love.
The back cover description presents the story as lovers pitted against the obstacles—and never mind that the title character is the Inquisitor’s cousin rather than niece and that the book presents him primarily as a statesman and patron of literature—but in fact the novel doesn’t seem to know whether it is romance or political intrigue or possibly an exploration of the early 16th-century literary scene. Major themes and figures of this fascinating era are reduced to type, including prophetic dreams, a self-flagellating priest, and an isolated Queen Juana the Mad licking herself in imitation of her beloved cats.
While readers may care about the characters in a generic way, it’s hard to get inside their experiences. The major actors do all have one thing in common, however: each one is vulnerable to blackmail. Enter Natale, a disgruntled Franciscan who serves as an informer for the Inquisition but plays every bit of knowledge he has to his own advantage. The main themes of the book turn out to be guilt, betrayal, fear, and suspicion under the shadow of the Inquisition.
