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 whenever 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.
