Tudor thrillers are thick on the ground nowadays but this one is rather special. The Bones of Avalon (Corvus, £16.99) is something of a departure for Phil Rickman, best known for his excellent Merrily Watkins series about a diocesan exorcist in contemporary Herefordshire. Here he writes in the first person as Dr John Dee, the astrologer, mathematician and adviser to Queen Elizabeth I. In 1560, William Cecil despatches him to Glastonbury, with his younger but more sophisticated friend Robert Dudley, to search for the bones of King Arthur. But Dee’s mission turns into far more than an attempt to strengthen the dynastic foundations of the Tudor dynasty: there’s a conspiracy against the Queen for him to contend with, and also something even darker lurking in the shadows.
Rickman makes a wonderfully assured leap into the 16th century. In this compelling and historically convincing novel, he recreates a world of religious and political uncertainty where one man’s science is another man’s witchcraft, and where the mundane and the mystical rub shoulders.
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