The Queene's Cure
An Elizabeth I Mystery
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Karen Harper’s crowd-pleasing Elizabeth I Mystery series, hailed as “extraordinary” by the Los Angeles Times, continues with this marvelous, majestic novel. The Queene’s Cure transports us into the shadowy world of sixteenth-century medicine, as an enlightened young queen seeks the cures that could heal a realm and transform a land....
In late summer of 1562, within a bedchamber at Whitehall Palace, Elizabeth Tudor prays for the recovery of the delirious, fever-racked friend who has served her for twenty-six of her twenty-nine years. Ten days later, with loyal, handsome Lord Robert Dudley by her side, the queen leads her retinue to London’s Royal College of Physicians to enlist two learned doctors in the raging battle against disease and pestilence.
She knows she has no trusted allies in Peter Pascal and John Caius, ardent Papist sympathizers with long-standing grievances against the Tudors. Yet even the stalwart queen is shaken when a frighteningly lifelike effigy of herself ravaged by pox turns up in her royal coach. Elizabeth’s fear that the counterfeit corpse is a harbinger of impending tragedy comes to fruition when ever more terrifying transgressions penetrate the very heart of her royal precincts.
With the help of her Privy Plot Council and an intriguing healer whose curative arts are at odds with the dangerous Royal College, Elizabeth resolves to unmask a murderer who wears a false face and is beset by the vilest humours of the soul. But when she herself falls ill, an entire realm is caught in the grip of a treasonous conspiracy to take a queen’s life and throne.
Peopled by a rich cast of fascinating figures from the swirling mists of history, The Queene’s Cure brings a vibrant, violent age unforgettably to life. Racing to a chilling climax where ordinary men play God and where Elizabeth Tudor could meet the same fate as her mother, Anne Boleyn, this is a gripping and captivating story of an indomitable young monarch...fighting for her life, her realm, and her rightful crown.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The early years of Elizabeth I's reign were a bloody, tumultuous time in British history, but Harper's fourth mystery to feature the virgin queen as sleuth (after 2001's The Twylight Tower) is, by comparison, rather anemic, being set in the world of 16th-century medicine. Two physicians and an untried monarch quarreling over the best way to treat disease is not the stuff of compelling conflict. A more serious danger to the young queen eventually surfaces, rooted in the endless squabbles over the right to the crown. Unfortunately, the author loads up the story with so many characters (25 in the first chapter alone) that the palace intrigue is more irritating than intriguing. The queen herself, as Harper presents her, is not a particularly sympathetic character. If this is a true portrait, mayhap she came by it naturally: her father was, after all, Henry VIII, and her mother the ill-fated Anne Boleyn. As the danger increases, Elizabeth calls together a motley crew of trusted advisers, a group she has dubbed the Privy Plot Council, and leads them in a spirited investigation of the threat to her life. Strip away the historical name dropping, the unrequited loves and the royal histrionics, and you'll find a neatly plotted mystery, with genuinely terrifying scenes at the climax. Alas, the novel sinks under the weight of all those personages and the burden of keeping them straight. The murky view of Hampton Court above a tomb effigy on the jacket nicely conveys the book's atmosphere.
