When Kit Alvarez returns from Muscovy, it is to discover that her post as physician at St Thomas's hospital has been given to another. Trying to eke out the small income she earns from some of Dr Nuñez's private patients, she undertakes paid work as a copyist with James Burbage's company. But the players' companies find themselves under threat. Two of Burbage's men are murdered. One of Henslowe's men is attacked. And two important new plays go missing, one by Will Shakespeare and one by Christopher Marlowe. Are the thefts merely the work of a jealous unlicensed company? Or is there a conspiracy afoot to use the plays in some more dangerous game?
About the Author: Ann Swinfen spent her childhood partly in England and partly on the east coast of America. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Classics and Mathematics and married a fellow undergraduate, the historian David Swinfen. While bringing up their five children and studying for a postgraduate MSc in Mathematics and a BA and PhD in English Literature, she had a variety of jobs, including university lecturer, translator, freelance journalist and software designer. Her first three novels, The Anniversary, The Travellers, and A Running Tide, all with a contemporary setting, were published by Random House, with translations into Dutch and German. She has now published eleven historical novels. The Testament of Mariam, set in the first century, recounts, from an unusual perspective, one of the most famous and yet ambiguous stories in human history, while exploring life under a foreign occupying force, in lands still torn by conflict to this day. Flood takes place in the fenlands of East Anglia during the seventeenth century, where the local people fought desperately to save their land from greedy and unscrupulous speculators. The second novel in the Fenland Series, Betrayal, continues the story of the search for legal redress and security for the embattled villagers. This Rough Ocean is based on the real-life experiences of the Swinfen family during the 1640s, at the time of the English Civil War, when John Swynfen was imprisoned for opposing the killing of the king, and his wife Anne had to fight for the survival of her children and dependents. Her major late sixteenth century series features a young Marrano physician who is recruited as a code-breaker and spy in Walsingham's intelligence service, with seven novels so far: The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez, The Enterprise of England, The Portuguese Affair, Bartholomew Fair, Suffer the Little Children, Voyage to Muscovy, and The Play's the Thing. She now lives in Broughty Ferry, on the northeast coast of Scotland, with her husband, formerly vice-principal of the University of Dundee, and a rescue cat called Maxi. www.annswinfen.com