Böcker av Chris Crowcroft

Retired investigator Richard Palmer lives in the Charterhouse, a charity case engaged in regular altercations with the Preacher who is trying to make him conform. Nearly everyone has died, among them Chief Minister Cecil his old client and William Shakespeare his bête noir, the one who got away.A letter from his goddaughter Miracle in Oxford brings him up short. Her foster parents have died, she is in trouble; and she is in love with an impecunious student who harbours a dream to go to London, the Court and make his name as a writer. Worse, William Davenant fancies himself to be Shakespeare's heir in body as well as soul.Palmer brings Miracle back to London to lodge with his old flame Emilia Lanier. The story charts Miracle's fate and the rise of the charming and unreliable Davenant in the houses of the nobility and the world of court musicians and actors including the brilliant Nicholas Lanier and a crusty old survivor in the Kings' Men, John Hemmings. Meantime the Caroline age succeeds the Jacobean leading on to Civil War.

8 February 1601. The personal troops of a disgraced royal favourite mount up and ride on the City of London. Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex and his lieutenant, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton are in open revolt against Queen Elizabeth I and her Government. Richard Palmer is swept up in the action. He calls himself an investigator, others call him an informer. Chief Minister Cecil has need for one - the Queen is enraged by the revival of a play at the Globe about deposing a reigning monarch in favour of a populist rival. Was Richard II meant to get the mob in the mood for regicide? She thinks so.A handful of sonnets found in Southampton's lodgings show a potentially incriminating special bond between him and the play's author, William Shakespeare. Palmer sets off on an expanding trail of sonnets from London to Stratford, and a mystery pursuer is on his tail...Chris Crowcroft travelled the world as an army brat. A degree in Law at Oxford University and teaching English in Verona preceded a London career in the arts and in politics. In 2009 he helped save the roof falling in on the head of Shakespeare where he lies buried in Stratford-upon-Avon.