A Matter of Blood (Tom Walsingham Mysteries)
Paris, 1588. This is the sixth in the writer’s Tom Walsingham Mysteries series. Tom is cousin to Sir Francis Walsingham, principal secretary and spymaster to Queen Elizabeth, and acts as his confidential investigator. This involves him in conducting all kinds of secret, shady and sinister business, and demands the practitioner to be an astute and cunning operator. Tom is sent to Paris when it appears that there has been a security leak in the spy network at the English embassy, as well as the possibility that the murder of Charles Arundel, a member of the aristocracy, has been hidden as death by natural causes.
Intelligence and spying are an arcane pursuit, and indeed the game that Tom plays with his various political and state interlocutors can be complicated and convoluted, which demands that the reader has to keep their wits about them to follow the subtleties of the plot. It reads a little like a 16th-century John le Carré novel. Giuliani shows a comprehensive knowledge of 16th– century history and life, and the novel is fully absorbed in the milieu of late 16th-century England and France. She provides an absorbing afternote about the historical background and the research she got lost in to underpin the story. As Giuliani says: ‘while historical accuracy is all important, research should never overwhelm or hijack the story.’ Yes indeed. Not having read any of the previous books in the series is not a great handicap, as many of the main characters and the general political environment are already well known to most readers of historical fiction, and the novel certainly stands alone as a coherent story.
