The Heretic's Creed

Starred review from November 7, 2016
Buckley’s outstanding 14th Tudor mystery (after 2015’s A Perilous Alliance) takes Ursula Blanchard, the intelligent, resourceful gentlewoman with a secret family connection to Elizabeth I, to an unofficial convent in a remote corner of the Yorkshire moors. An ostensible diplomatic visit to the court of the child king of Scotland, James VI, plays cover for Blanchard’s investigation of Stonemoor House, where two men have gone on the queen’s business before—and never returned. Buckley manages not only to imbue the would-be convent, reached in the midst of a snowstorm no less, with mystery and menace but also to dramatize how difficult it was for a woman to live an independent life in the 1570s, whether she be Protestant widow or aristocratic Catholic spinster. It was a time when religious calling was hopelessly tangled with political loyalty, and people could easily mistake an herbal cure for a witch’s potion. Still, there are no caricatured villains in this layered entry. Buckley draws even the most minor characters with subtlety and skill, making the dramatic conclusion that much more satisfying.

December 1, 2016

In her 14th series outing (after A Perilous Alliance), Ursula Blanchard is sent to Yorkshire to acquire a medieval manuscript currently in the possession of a group of recusant nuns. Previous attempts to secure the book ended in the disappearance of the messengers.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2016
Buckley, the author of 13 Ursula Blanchard mysteries, takes a break from her Tudor series with a leisurely historical romance tinged with mystery. Set in the early days of the nineteenth century, this novel features a pair of star-crossed lovers who endure many years and many hardships before they are eventually united. Groomed to marry a neighboring landowner's son, English farmer's daughter Peggy Shawe falls immediately under the spell of dashing smuggler's son Ralph Duggan. In order to thwart their romance, Peggy's disapproving mother, in a remarkably unbelievable twist, sends her to live with the Duggans in order to convince her of the error of her ways. When murder and fate intervene, dispatching Ralph and his brother across the Atlantic to Antigua, a heartbroken Peggy reluctantly agrees to marry plodding James Bright. Of course, she continues to pine for Ralph, and when destiny and determination finally bring them together, the crime is solved and they find the flame of love has flickered, but endured.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

December 15, 2016
In this entry in Buckley's (A Traitor's Tears, 2014) long-running historical mystery series, Ursula Blanchard, illegitimate half-sister and former lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth, continues to wend her way through the tricky political, social, and familial quagmires imposed on her by birth, breeding, and station. At the behest of Sir William Cecil, lord treasurer and royal spymaster, Ursula undertakes a mysterious, two-pronged mission. Tasked to deliver a secret missive to Edinburgh, where intricate plots continue to swirl about Elizabeth's rival, Mary, Queen of Scots, and to recover an ancient manuscript housed in a rogue convent in the Yorkshire moors, she reluctantly travels northward. When she discovers that two earlier emissaries have vanished, it becomes increasingly clear that her assignment is not as straightforward as it initially seemed. Peril and intrigue lurk everywhere on the windswept moors as Ursula walks a fine line between danger and duty in another of Buckley's intelligent, historically accurate Elizabethan-era whodunits.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)