This is a powerhouse of a book and not for the faint of heart as we’re taken back to England in the mid 1660s, 1663 to be exact - Oxford, England at the height of Restoration. A bold display of class differences, monarchy, war and deception, treason and prison, poisoning and trials, public hangings, science versus religion, truth and lies. A plethora of autopsies, human and animal, transfusions. Just your typical Renaissance romp.
Anyone knowing anything of this period knows the civil unrest and the intrigues of the times. With Cromwell dead and the monarchy restored, England is in an uneasy period and even the hallowed cloisters of Oxford provide no refuge.
The place is New College, Oxford and a professor, Dr. Robert Grove, is found dead in his college suite from what appears to be arsenic poisoning. A missing ring from the doctor's hand quickly leads the officials to arrest a former chambermaid, a young and very comely Sarah Blundy. Though there is little investigation in the crime, Sarah, though she’s innocent, quickly confesses to the murder and is hanged.
End of story? No. Just the beginning. Was Sarah actually innocent?
Enter Marco da Cola, a visiting Venetian popinjay. A self-described ''gentleman of Venice'' also trained in medicine, Cola is a dilettante physician of sorts. After learning of Sarah's ailing mother Anne, and somewhat infatuated with Sarah, Marco begins treating Anne. The very Catholic Marco is intent on claiming credit for the invention of blood transfusion. He feels with the use of his discovery on Anne, he will be readily accepted into the medical fold of his peers.
There is also Sarah's former lover Jack Prestcott, an undergraduate and man of violent passions. Jailed for attacking his guardian, he is consumed with proving that his exiled father was hounded to his death, innocent of the charge of treason the returning monarch Charles II's supporters had lodged against him.
As we learn more about young Sarah, we are introduced to a wealth of possible murderers and through the telling by four different people, we get to the events leading up to the death of Dr. Grove. Da Cola's account opens the book, which introduces us to all major and most minor characters, followed by Jack Prestcott's account which exudes the bitterness of the wronged; then comes Dr. Wallis' account; he twists all events to conform to his paranoid worldview. Dr. Wallis is a mathematician, and Cryptographer for three Kings and Parliament, and lives, eats and breathes cryptography. He believes he sees a sinister underlying truth in everything.
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