Review: The Queen’s Spy

The Queen’s Spy by Clare Marchant
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In 2021 Mathilde is a photojournalist travelling the world in her beatn-up old campervan after her emotionally fragile mother died in a house fire when Mathilde was just sixteen years old. She receives a mysterious letter from an English solicitor demanding she appear at an old manor house in Norfolk. On arrival she discovers that her father did not die in a car bomb in Lebanon when she was five years old as she had always believed, instead he had survived and spent the rest of his life trying to find Mathilde and her mother, he has recently died and left the manor house to Mathilde. Although initially determined to sell the house and resume her travels, Mathilde finds herself drawn to the house, haunted by dreams of historical events and a mysterious figure.

In 1584 Tom Lutton, a deaf mute apothecary, lands in England from his home in France. His skill at healing the captain of the ship that brought him to England lands him an interview and a position as assistant apothecary in the court of Queen Elizabeth I where his lip reading skills bring him to the attention of the Queen's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham.

There are many similarities between Tom and Mathilde's lives, similarities which only become more tangled when Mathilde uncovers some of her new home's secrets.

I have read several of these split narrative stories previously, Nicola Cornick's The Forgotten Sister being a recent example and, in my opinion, they work best when you get immersed into one story for long periods then metaphorically yanked into the present day, or vice versa. Unfortunately, in this book it felt like the two narratives were told in alternate chapters and so I never really got invested in either story. Also, perhaps because it was written in the third person, or perhaps because of the alternating timelines, I felt like the book was all telling and no showing, I didn't feel any increase in tension as Tom got drawn deeper and deeper into spying on the courtiers plotting against the Queen and the present day dramas felt equally lukewarm.

Finally, did the person who chose the cover read the book? It's about an Elizabethan male apothecary spying for the Queen, who is the woman on the cover and what is the significance of the gold cup? Surely a man in a blue jacket would have been more apt? Or at least a picture of Queen Elizabeth if it had to be a woman?

Overall, I felt the book just skated across what could have been a gripping historical tale and I didn't feel any investment in the characters, everyone felt a bit one-dimensional, even Tom and Mathilde.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

View all my reviews