The Ring

September 23, 2013
Christopher “Kit” Marlowe has achieved fame as a playwright in Trow’s intricately plotted fifth historical featuring the scholar and former secret intelligence officer (after Scorpions’ Nest). Unfortunately, on the opening night of Kit’s play Tamburlaine at London’s Rose theater, landlady Eleanor Marchant is fatally shot in her seat, apparently by a stage gun wielded by bit player Will Shakespeare. When the authorities find that Will is Eleanor’s boarder and that Eleanor and her seductive sister, Constance, attended the play as his guests, he is jailed. At great personal peril, the swashbuckling, witty Kit attempts to prove Will innocent, along the way encountering illegal moneylending, two more murders, sexual intrigue, and lots of unrepentant rogues. Some playful anachronisms notwithstanding, lovers of the period will enjoy the appearances by historical figures, irreverent glimpses of Elizabethan theater, and richly detailed depictions of a corrupt, colorful city.

November 1, 2013

Marlowe's friend Will Shakespeare stands accused of murder when an onstage musket shot kills a member of the audience. Kit must get to the root of the problem in his fifth entry (after Scorpions' Nest).

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2018
While it may be difficult to imagine a story that successfully combines lighthearted humor with multiple gruesome murders, Trow manages to do it brilliantly in this latest installment of the Grand and Batchelor historical-mystery series. Their latest outing, set in 1873, has the pair investigating the kidnapping of Emilia Byng, wife of London tea merchant Selwyn Byng, who claims he can't pay the ransom unless he has access to Emilia's substantial trust fund, which she's not due to receive until she turns 35. The plot begins to thicken when a woman's mutilated body is dragged from the Thames, and the detectives find that Byng has omitted vital information in his description of the kidnapping. It's hard not to like Grand, a wealthy American, and Batchelor, a British ex-journalist who's had to scratch for a living, or to fail to laugh at some of their more outrageous adventures, even as they are investigating the most brutal crimes. These qualities, added to engaging style and a gripping plot, make this one a sure bet for historical-mystery fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2013
With the occasional snappy retort or quote from Shakespeare and Marlowe, this witty fifth mystery in the Kit Marlowe series keeps pace with the others as a decent puzzle and divertissement. Readers are advised to peruse the series in order, or wrestle with the many names and relationships introduced here. Kit Marlowe, playwright and sometime Queen's spy, uses his myriad connections and knowledge of London's political and underworld dramatis personae to clear William Shakespeare's name of a full-view, onstage killing and solve two possibly related murders. The leisurely pace and daily difficulties of Elizabethan life, evoked with an ornate style and the sometimes obscure vocabulary of the time (snaphaunce, deodand, catchpole), along with droll situational humor, focus attention on Marlowe's creative wit and his opponents' deceitful illusions more than on the puzzle's solution. A few anachronisms mar the telling ( Cambridge was so six months ago ), but fans of the series and of Edward Marston's amusing Elizabethan theater mysteries, featuring Nicholas Bracewell, will enjoy Kit Marlowe's part in the drama at the Crimson Rose.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)