A Plague Of Angels - Hardcover

P.F. Chisholm; Patricia Finney

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0340671629 ISBN 13: 9780340671627

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998

Synopsis

In 1592, dashing courtier Sir Robert Carey took up his northern post as Warden of the West March in order to escape the complications of creditors and court life. Trouble, however, dogs his heels wherever he goes. And where he goes in autumn, after the summer's misadventures in Carlisle, is back to London upon a summons from his father.

Carey is on difficult terms with his powerful sire, Henry, Lord Hunsdon. Hunsdon, son of Anne Boleyn's elder sister, Mary -- and probably of a young King Henry VIII -- swings a lot of weight as ""cousin"" to Queen Elizabeth. But Hunsdon needs his ingenious younger son, Carey to sort out the difficulties his elder son has got himself into as an innocent party in a plot to discredit the family.

Accompanied by the shrewd Sergeant George Dodd, who's like a fish out of water as he copes with the strange Londoners, Carey tackles Catholics, treachery, and such persons known to history and students of literature as George Greene and Christopher Marlowe who are working as spies and double agents. Most arresting is a portrait of a love-sick, snivelling hanger-on named Will Shakespeare....

About this title

About the Author

Patricia Finney (who writes as P. F. Chisholm) has been writing since she was seven and getting paid for it since she was 15. Her first book, A Shadow of Gulls, was published when she was 18 years old, and won the David Higham Award for Best First Novel. She studied Modern History at Wadham College, Oxford. Since which time she has accumulated an American husband, one daughter, two sons, a dog and three cats, plus assorted rodents theoretically owned by her offspring. Her husband’s work as a barrister (an English lawyer, specialising in litigation) has given her fascinating insight into real-life crime and her children have taught her more than she wanted to know about human nature. She has had a variety of jobs which have included editing a medical journal and writing a weekly column in the London Evening Standard. She presently lives in Cornwall, and is working on the next couple of Carey stories, and some screenplays. She is planning a contemporary novel as well, whenever her fulltime work as nanny, chauffeur, handywoman, administrator, accountant and legal secretary gives her a chance to write it.

From Publishers Weekly

In this fourth mystery featuring Sir Robert Carey (after A Surfeit of Guns), strong writing and a wealth of detail about Elizabethan London cannot make up for a painfully slow plot. The book opens with Carey and his sidekick, Sergeant Dodd, on the road to London, a clever and lively scene that promises much more action than what actually follows. Carey, based on a historical figure of the same name, has been called to the city by his father, Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon, half-brother to Queen Elizabeth, to search for his missing brother Edmund. It seems Edmund, never the most sensible of men, has gotten himself mixed up in false alchemy and counterfeiting, a crime that is considered treason. As Carey and Dodd investigate the scheme that drew in Edmund, they discover that Thomas Heneage, the greedy and cruel vice chamberlain, is almost certainly involved. Facts, however, are as elusive as Edmund continues to be. Alternately helped and hindered by the playwrights Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, and merely frustrated by the poet Robert Greene, Carey and Dodd dart about the streets of London, visiting bars and churches, literally avoiding the plague as well as the wiles of the lovely Mistress Bassano. Traitors and allies are finally sorted out in the Fleet, a debtor's prison in London that Chisholm (the pseudonym of historical novelist Patricia Finney) portrays in all its sordid misery. (Nov. 30)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0340671629
• ISBN 13: 9780340671627
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 287