Face Down Across

Have all the years that Susanna, Lady Appleton spent experimenting with poison herbs unleashed an evil that could account for all the dead bodies she encounters? No, Kathy Lynn Emerson's latest, Face Down Across the Sea, doesn't contain any element of the supernatural: instead it features a wealth of minuscule period details (which will be familiar to fans of the series); a group of 16th-century scholars attempting to discern England's rights to the New World; and the strong-minded heroine's investigations into a crucial missing transcript and murderer's motives.