The Sinner’s Mark: Volume 6 (The Jackdaw Mysteries)
This is sixth in Perry’s Elizabethan Jackdaw Mysteries series, and we know Nicholas Shelby, Bianca, Rose and Ned from the earlier books. Their characters are further developed here, and the necessary backstory is well-handled.
Nicholas, the queens’ physician, is summoned to Queen Elizabeth’s bedside. She is fading but nevertheless still interested in ‘young men with good calves and passable looks’.
Nicholas’s father is accused of distributing a seditious tract and is determined to clear his name. One of the suppliers of ingredients for Nicholas’s wife Bianca’s ‘simples’, Aksel Leezen, has bequeathed her his house in the Steelyard, complete with plaster casts of bones – écorché models, for studying anatomy, explains Nicholas – and a gruesome wooded effigy of a dead girl with half a face. Three young boys go missing. An old war-buddy arrives – a Protestant zealot with the marvellous name of Petrus Eusebius Schenk.
As Shakespeare’s players act the assassination of Julius Caesar, actors in another plot are laying dastardly plans. As well as the nods to the Gunpowder Plot, which would happen five years after the events in this story, there are episodes inspired by real occurrences in Elizabethan London. The plot develops languidly. The slow pace allows for character development and scene-setting and gives one a feeling of the period, when even a trip across London required a horse ride, a wherry across the river, a stay in an inn.
Another element comes across as true to the period: the schizophrenic and precarious nature of the religious ups and downs and the shifting goalposts on what was considered heresy. The character Ned voices the experience of someone newly inspired by revolutionary Protestant sermons. The dialogue is good, but we don’t really hear the voices of the characters, only the voice of the omniscient narrator. If you enjoyed the earlier books in this series, this will not disappoint.
