The Queene's Cure: An Elizabeth I Mystery

By Karen Harper

Karen Harper’s crowd-pleasing Elizabeth I Mystery series, hailed as “extraordinary” by the Los Angeles Times, continues with this marvelous, majestic novel. The Queene’s Cure transports us into the shadowy world of sixteenth-century medicine, as an enlightened young queen seeks the cures that could heal a realm and transform a land....

In late summer of 1562, within a bedchamber at Whitehall Palace, Elizabeth Tudor prays for the recovery of the delirious, fever-racked friend who has served her for twenty-six of her twenty-nine years. Ten days later, with loyal, handsome Lord Robert Dudley by her side, the queen leads her retinue to London’s Royal College of Physicians to enlist two learned doctors in the raging battle against disease and pestilence.

She knows she has no trusted allies in Peter Pascal and John Caius, ardent Papist sympathizers with long-standing grievances against the Tudors. Yet even the stalwart queen is shaken when a frighteningly lifelike effigy of herself ravaged by pox turns up in her royal coach. Elizabeth’s fear that the counterfeit corpse is a harbinger of impending tragedy comes to fruition when ever more terrifying transgressions penetrate the very heart of her royal precincts.

With the help of her Privy Plot Council and an intriguing healer whose curative arts are at odds with the dangerous Royal College, Elizabeth resolves to unmask a murderer who wears a false face and is beset by the vilest humours of the soul. But when she herself falls ill, an entire realm is caught in the grip of a treasonous conspiracy to take a queen’s life and throne.

Peopled by a rich cast of fascinating figures from the swirling mists of history, The Queene’s Cure brings a vibrant, violent age unforgettably to life. Racing to a chilling climax where ordinary men play God and where Elizabeth Tudor could meet the same fate as her mother, Anne Boleyn, this is a gripping and captivating story of an indomitable young monarch...fighting for her life, her realm, and her rightful crown.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 4, 2009
• ISBN: 9780307566133

Karen Harper

New York Times and USA Today bestselling author KAREN HARPER is a former Ohio State University instructor and high school English teacher. Published since 1982, she writes contemporary suspense and historical novels about real British women. Two of her recent Tudor-era books were bestsellers in the UK and Russia. Harper won the Mary Higgins Clark Award for Dark Angel, and her novel Shattered Secrets was judged one of the best books of the year by Suspense Magazine.

Reviews for The Queene's Cure

[lecari_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a historical fiction/mystery, following Elizabeth I and her court. An effigy is found in her coach when she visits the Royal Physicians, and no one knows how it got there - it looks exactly like her, even wearing one of her gowns, but is covered in small pox marks. Slowly other mysterious things start to happen and the Queen becomes more and more afraid for her safety, especially when she then falls down with small pox.This was entertaining enough, but I didn’t think that it was very believable. Elizabeth’s character seemed a bit shallow and one-dimensional to me, and I just didn’t believe that she would have behaved the way she did – I know she was paranoid about her safety, but I don’t think it would’ve been something she would have personally investigated and questioned possible suspects! But it was a good read otherwise, and certainly an original idea.