It is 1663 and England is wracked with intrigue and civil strife. When anOxford don is murdered it seems at first that the incident can have nothing todo with g... » 

It is 1663 and England is wracked with intrigue and civil strife. When anOxford don is murdered it seems at first that the incident can have nothing todo with great matters of church and state. Who poured the arsenic into thevictims brandy? The evidence points to Sarah Blundy a servant girl....Sheconfesses to the crime and is sentenced to be hanged.Yet little is as it seems in this gripping novel which dramatizes the waysin which witnesses can see the same events yet remember them falsely. Each offour narrators a Venetian medical student a young man intent on proving hislate father innocent of treason a cryptographer and an archivist fingers adifferent culprit... an erudite and entertaining tour de force. People «