Auriel Rising - Softcover

Redfern, Elizabeth

3.4

198 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0515139424 ISBN 13: 9780515139426

Publisher: Jove, 2005

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An exile and fugitive from England, Ned Warriner returns to his homeland in spite of the danger to search for his beloved, Kate Revill, unhappily married to an ardent anti-Catholic, and becomes caught up in the intrigues of the early seventeenth-century English court and the quest for the secret of the Philosopher's Stone. Reprint.

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About the Author:

Elizabeth Redfern is a teacher and musician.

From Publishers Weekly:

Richly atmospheric but overstuffed, this second historical thriller by Redfern (The Music of the Spheres) is set in London in 1609, where everyone, from imprisoned Sir Walter Raleigh to the lowliest wench, is clamoring for a letter apparently containing the recipe for the Philosopher's Stone�€"the elusive object that transforms matter into gold. The letter, addressed to someone named "Auriel," has fallen into the possession of Ned Warriner, a handsome lute player back in town after a two-year exile, hoping to see his childhood sweetheart, Kate, and the son he suspects is theirs. Kate is now unhappily married to Francis Pelham, a brutal hunter of Catholics who justifiably sees Ned as a threat to the Protestant King James. Fearing Pelham's inquisitorial zeal, Ned seeks the protection of the Earl of Northampton, a predatory homosexual who bribes his former protégé into assassinating Prince Henry's corrupt chief clerk, John Lovett. To do the deed, Ned infiltrates the royal family's inner circle, mingling with the prince's scheming advisers and strangely powerful gardener while enduring the sexual attentions of Lovett's wife, Sarah, who is eager to implicate her husband in a potential coup. Meanwhile, Ned tries to decipher the mysterious letter by showing it to various Londoners schooled in alchemy; all are gruesomely murdered shortly thereafter. Only Robin Green, a young apprentice to a silversmith, eludes the murderers to attempt the recipe, but as the threat of violence looms larger, Ned isn't sure it's worth the effort. Redfern's strength is in recreating a morally corrupt world obsessed with the letter's mystical-sounding abstractions. But her tale is both relentlessly bleak and too busy, crowded with one-note villains who double-cross one another with perplexing frequency and heroes who are blank and oddly passive rather than intriguingly flawed.
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