The Dead of Winter

December 15, 2020
This collection of three absorbing novellas follows the five novels of Parris' brilliant Giordano Bruno series, and details the earlier life of the young priest in sixteenth-century Italy, before he fled his homeland and the Inquisition and found himself working as a master spy for Elizabeth I. During the sweltering Naples summer of 1566 (a "simmering human soup"), Bruno assists his mentor, Fra Gennaro, in an illicit autopsy performed on the body of a young woman whose murder leads him to seek justice for her family. Bruno is revealed to be the most promising student his monastery has ever had, although already questioning the authority of the Catholic Church and the excesses of the Inquisition. Subsequently, he is embraced by a secret society of philosophers and scholars and finds that keeping their heretical secrets places him in grave danger. And, in the final tale, Bruno is summoned by the pope himself to display his unusual talents for memorization and recitation and barely escapes Rome alive. In two days, he faces accusations of rape by a cardinal's sister and of witchcraft by the pontiff and kills a man in a duel. The cracks in his faith widen into chasms. This is historical mystery at its absolute strongest, and quite possibly the best prequel ever in crime fiction.

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