"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....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

Iain Pears's The Dream of Scipio and The Portrait are also available from Riverhead Books.