A Murder Too Soon
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Jack Blackjack is ordered to eliminate a spy in Princess Elizabeth’s household in this engaging Tudor mystery.
June, 1554. Former cutpurse and now professional assassin Jack Blackjack has deep misgivings about his latest assignment. He has been despatched to the Palace of Woodstock, where Queen Mary’s half-sister Princess Elizabeth is being kept under close guard. Jack’s employer has reason to believe that a spy has been installed within the princess’s household, and Jack has been ordered to kill her.
Jack has no choice but to agree. But he arrives at Woodstock to discover that a murder has already been committed.
As he sets out to prove his innocence by uncovering the real killer, Jack finds the palace to be a place steeped in misery and deceit; a hotbed of illicit love affairs, seething resentments, clashing egos and bitter jealousies. But who among Woodstock’s residents is hiding a deadly secret – and will Jack survive long enough to find out?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Jecks's Rebellion's Message (2016), gambler Jack Blackjack, who lives among "the purse-snatchers and pilferers" of London, got caught up in the 1554 rebellion that sought to overthrow Queen Mary. In this engrossing sequel set in the same year, the kingdom of England is calm only on the surface. Since he's eager to escape a paramour's jealous husband in London, Jack agrees to undertake a distasteful job for his patron, Sir Thomas Percy to travel beyond Oxford to the palace of Woodstock, where Princess Elizabeth is confined, and murder one of Elizabeth's guardians, Lady Margery, who poses a threat to the princess's security and safety. When Jack arrives in Woodstock, "a place steeped in misery and deceit," he's astonished to discover that Lady Margery has already been murdered. Jack, himself a suspect, faces the daunting task of identifying the real killer. Plot twists abound, but the novel's greatest strength is its jaunty tone, plunging the reader into raucous Elizabethan England, when the lady herself was still but "a trim little thing."
