The Mad Courtesan (Nicholas Bracewell Mysteries) - Softcover

Quelle surprise, an actor with a weakness for women

and a reluctance to pay his debts.

“In this riotous fifth novel...the tragedies being performed onstage pale in comparison to all the blood and thunder offstage.”—The Washington Post Book World.

Though the lusty star Lord Westfield’s Men, Laurence Firethorn, is always ripe for seducing women bewitched by his art, the vicious rivalry that disrupts the acting troupe erupts between two other players. Owen Elias is a surly, envious Welshman, while Sebastian Carrick is an amiable and attractive gentleman. Their onstage duels become ever more realistic, but it is an axe that splits open Sebastian’s head one night in a Clerkenwell alley. Company book holder Nicholas Bracewell, used to damage control, begins to investigate the victim’s death and learns that in life, he was prone to make enemies from his weakness for women and his willingness to welch on debts. A web of deception has in fact been spun that stretches from lowly to high ranking courtesans, all the way to the Virgin Queen. And what of the horse Nimbus, promised to perform Pegasus-like at the very top of St. Paul’s Church?