Heresy
Books | Fiction / Thrillers / Historical
4
S.J. Parris
Masterfully blending true events with fiction, this blockbuster historical thriller delivers a page-turning murder mystery set on the sixteenth-century Oxford University campus.Giordano Bruno was a monk, poet, scientist, and magician on the run from the Roman Inquisition on charges of heresy for his belief that the Earth orbits the sun and that the universe is infinite. This alone could have got him burned at the stake, but he was also a student of occult philosophies and magic. In S. J. Parris's gripping novel, Bruno's pursuit of this rare knowledge brings him to London, where he is unexpectedly recruited by Queen Elizabeth I and is sent undercover to Oxford University on the pretext of a royal visitation. Officially Bruno is to take part in a debate on the Copernican theory of the universe; unofficially, he is to find out whatever he can about a Catholic plot to overthrow the queen. His mission is dramatically thrown off course by a series of grisly murders and a spirited and beautiful young woman. As Bruno begins to discover a pattern in these killings, he realizes that no one at Oxford is who he seems to be. Bruno must attempt to outwit a killer who appears obsessed with the boundary between truth and heresy. Like The Dante Club and The Alienist, this clever, sophisticated, exceptionally enjoyable novel is written with the unstoppable narrative propulsion and stylistic flair of the very best historical thrillers.
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Author
S.J. Parris
Pages
320
Publisher
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published Date
2010-02-23
ISBN
038553129X 9780385531290
Ratings
Google: 3.5
Community ReviewsSee all
"Didn’t make me cry like The Devil and the Dark Water, but it was definitely a good read! It was a very interesting and original take to have a historical fiction mystery from the first person perspective and I loved it! Looking forward to reading the rest of this series!"
Jessie Heady
"Some positives; he chose good misconceptions to tackle and I thought he did a pretty good job with "was Hitler a Christian" in particular. But instead of directly tackling each misconception as the boom went on, he veered more and more towards direct Christian apologetics, rather than an actual interaction with the cleverer aspects of the "heresies". by the final chapter he just descended to soapbox preaching of social and fiscal conservatism, not even bothering to represent a range of Christian belief but rather making arguments on why homosexuality is wrong and so forth (not very good ones either, at least in part because he tries to deal with them in a page each). He tried to do too much....and ended up not doing very much at all. An easy read, not a total waste of time, but wouldn't begin to convince somebody on the fence even. A few useful apologetics tidbits was all I gleaned and it baffles me why people speak of Coren as an intellectual giant or brilliant writer when he can't even hold his thoughts on topic unless they just enjoy confirmation bias. Even sharing Christianity with Coren wasn't enough for me to give this book more than two, maybe 2.5 stars if you pretend the final chapter never happened."
T P
Teresa Prokopanko
"Lost respect for this book when the subtitle read "An historical thriller"."
Glenda Garrison