Showing results by publisher "riverrun" in Historical Fiction

In a French village, the body of a man shot through the head is disinterred by the roots of a fallen tree. A week later a famous art critic is murdered in a nearby house. The deaths occurred more than 70 years apart. Asked by a colleague to inspect the site of the former, forensics expert Enzo Macleod quickly finds himself embroiled in the investigation of the latter. Two extraordinary narratives are set in train - one historical, unfolding in the treacherous wartime years of occupied France, the other contemporary, set in the autumn of 2020 as France re-enters Covid lockdown.

Embra, winter of 1574. Queen Mary has fled Scotland, to raise an army from the French. Her son and heir, Jamie, is held under protection in Stirling Castle. John Knox is dead. The people are unmoored and lurching under the uncertain governance of this riven land. It's a deadly time for young student Will Fowler, short of stature, low of birth but mightily ambitious, to make his name.

Daniel Amat has left Spain and all that happened there behind him. Having just achieved a brilliant role in ancient languages at Oxford University and an even more advantageous engagement, the arrival of a letter - a demand - stamped 'Barcelona' comes like a cold hand from behind. He arrives back in that old labyrinthine and near-mythic city a few days before the great 1888 World's Fair, amid dread whispers of murders - the injuries reminiscent of an ancient curse and bearing signs of the genius 16th century anatomist Vesalius.