The Music of the Spheres Book

To the ranks of Caleb Carr, Iain Pears, and Umberto Eco comes a stunning new voice in historical fiction. "Intricately plotted, beautifully paced, The Music of the Spheres is an elegant historical novel rich in detail, at times Dickensian in its description of London. Elizabeth Redfern has made an exciting debut. "-Martha Grimes In the London of 1795, intrigue and death walk the dark streets. England is at war with its neighbor and nemesis, France, and espionage is rampant. It is the job of Jonathan Absey at the Home Office to catch these spies, but his mind is elsewhere, his dreams haunted by the still unsolved murder of his fifteen-year-old daughter in these same streets. Desperately pursuing both investigations, he stumbles across a strange society of astronomers called the Company of Titius who are on a furious search of their own: to discover a long-lost star in the wide black sky. Soon, as he digs into their arcane world, their quest begins to merge with his own, and Absey finds himself discovering more than he had ever imagined-not only about spies and murderers but also about celestial numbers and the making of codes; about passions as unnatural as they are obsessive; and about the bonds of family . . . and the lengths we will go to preserve them. With The Music of the Spheres, Elizabeth Redfern emerges as an evocative and elegant writer of startling power, her gifts for characterization, atmosphere, narrative, and rich moral drama marking her as a new star in her own right.

Library Journal

Redfern's first novel is a complex story of plot and counterplot surrounding the murders of red-haired young prostitutes, the French Revolution and all its political machinations, and the search for the missing planet that astronomers conjecture must lie between Mars and Jupiter. Jonathan Absey works for the Home Office in London, reading correspondence in search of spies. When his estranged daughter is found strangled, he sets out to find her killer. His half-brother, Alexander, who is an astronomer and mathematician of some reputation, is searching for the missing planet. The brothers' paths begin to intertwine when a group of ex-patriot French astronomers are suspected of sending information to the Revolutionary Party in France, along with their star lists and mathematical calculations. Alexander infiltrates the group on Jonathan's instructions and discovers evil, obsession, depravity, and death. Read with an exceptional number of well-done voices and accents by Tim Curry, this is recommended. Joanna M. Burkhardt, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Univ. of Rhode Island, Providence Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.