Unicorn's Blood
David Becket and Simon Ames
Elizabethan Mystery Series Book Two
by Patricia Finney
Cover by Bryan Leister
Picador First American Edition
Description: Hardback book published by Picador / St. Martin's Press in 1998. The copyright page states 'First Picador USA Edition: February 1998' and the printing status bar is complete, making this a first printing. May have preceded the UK edition but cannot be sure. A sequel to Firedrake's Eye.
From the Front Flap: Unicorn's Blood, like Patricia Finny's earlier novel Firedrake's Eye, is a literary and historical tour de force and combines the scholarship of A. S. Byatt and the intrigue of John le Carre. England, mid-1580s. Facing an array of international foes and torn internally by religious strife, England finds that its safety depends more than ever on a slight woman of exceptional intellectual brilliance, a master of realpolitik - Queen Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, Gloriana. Elizabeth is revered like a goddess, her stature a shrewed political tool designed to hold her people together. And it's about the be destroyed by a dark revelation from the hidden part of her past. Narrated by a defrocked nun, a poignant victim of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, Unicorn's Blood is about a dangerous secret, the existence of a private diary kept by the Queen as a young princess. Should this stolen hournal, embroidered with a unicorn that has a ruby for an eye, fall into the wrong hands, its intimate revelations would destroy the entire edifice of Tudor government. One one side are the persecuted Catholic recusants, desperate to bring down their hated tormentor; on the other, Elizabeth's own ruthlessly ambitious spymasters, eager to hold the trump card against the Catholics - and against the Queen. The prize is the key to the real Elizabeth, written at a time when her own life stood in the balance. Unicorn's Blood is a story of betrayal, murder, and the price of passion at a time when one wrong step could end with the fall of an axe. It is also an eerily vivid re-creation of the Elizabethan Court, and an extraordinarily subtle and nuanced psychological portait of the woman who gave it her name.
Condition: Binding - very good, top and bottom of spine bumped, slight soiling of the endpapers, page edges slightly soiled. Dust jacket - very good, minor edgewear and wrinkling, not price clipped, in dust jacket protector.
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