Teaser Tuesday

Teaser Tuesday!

On my to-be-read pile is a book called THE BONES OF AVALON by Phil Rickman. It was published recently and has 480 pages. Here is a description:

When Elizabeth I's most trusted men fear for her safety and think there's a possibly supernatural plot against her, the obvious man to investigate it is Dr John Dee, her astrologer and consultant in the hidden arts. Aided by his former pupil – and Elizabeth's reputed lover – Robert Dudley, he travels to Glastonbury to try and find the bones of King Arthur. Glastonbury, however, has never recovered from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the execution of its beloved Abbot Richard Whiting, and many residents view the pair with suspicion. The exception to this is Nel Borrow, who treats Dudley when he's ill and becomes the first woman Dee has ever been interested in romantically. Can the three stop the villainous plot?

And here is an excerpt:

I must have been the only man that morning to touch it. They'd gathered around me in the alley, but when I put a hand into the coffin they all drew back.

A drab day, not long after the year's beginning. Sky like a soiled rag, sooted know still clinging to the cobbles I'd walked down, for maybe the last time, from the lodgings behind New Fish Street, through air already fugged with smoke from the morning fires. A stink of sour ale and vomit in the alley, and a hanging dread.

'Dr. Dee...'

The man pushing through the ring of onlookers wore a long black coat over a black doublet, expensive but unslashed. Mole-sleek hair was cut close to his skull.

'You may not remember me, Doctor.'

His voice soft, making him younger than his appearance suggested.

'Um...'

'Arrived in Cambridge not long before you left.

I was edging a cautious thumbnail over the yellowing face within the coffin. All the people you're supposed to recognize these days. Why? They're something then nothing, here then gone. Waste of study-time.

'Quite a big college,' I said.

'I think you were a reader in Greek at the time?'

Which would have made it 1547 or '48. I hadn't been back to Cambridge since, having -- to my mother's fierce consternation -- turned down a couple of proffered posts there. I looked up at him, shaking my head and begging mercy, for in truth I knew him not.

'Walsingham,' he said.

*****************************************************

Much love,

PK the Bookeemonster