"It is 1663, and England is wracked with intrigue and civil strife. When an Oxford don is murdered, it seems at first that the incident can have nothing to do with great matters of church and state. Who poured the arsenic into the victim's brandy? The evidence points to Sarah Blundy, a servant girl... She confesses to the crime and is sentenced to be hanged. "Yet, little is as it seems in this gripping novel, which dramatizes the ways in which witnesses can see the same events yet remember them falsely. Each of four narrators -- a Venetian medical student, a young man intent on proving his late father innocent of treason, a cryptographer and an archivist -- fingers a different culprit... an erudite and entertaining tour de force". -- People