Scribe sleuth Christine de Pizan must discover who wants to kill the king in the second installment of this richly imagined historical mystery series set in 14th Century France.
Paris, 1393. A masquerade ball at the palace ends in tragedy, with four revelers burned to death. Was it an accident…or did someone deliberately hurl a flaming torch at the dancers? Convinced it was an act of murder and that the king himself was the real target, Queen Isabeau has asked Christine de Pizan to spend time at court to uncover the identity of the would-be assassin.
With the king struck down by an illness no one can understand, Christine finds the palace to be a hotbed of rumor, suspicion, petty rivalries, and dark secrets: a place where no one can be trusted. Could the king’s ambitious brother, the Duke of Orleans, be responsible for the deaths? One of his embittered uncles? Or could the killer lie even closer to home…
Om författaren
Tania Bayard is a freelance writer and lecturer specializing in medieval art, culture, and horticulture. She has taught art history at Fordham, Rutgers, and Hofstra universities and is the author of a number of non-fiction books, including A Medieval Home Companion: Housekeeping in the Fourteenth Century. Previously, she was the curator of the Biblical Garden at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City and assistant horticulturist at The Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.