Books by Fiona Buckley and Complete Book Reviews
Fiona Buckley, Author . Scribner $23 (288p) ISBN 978-0-7432-0264-0
Ursula Blanchard, lady-in-waiting and espionage agent to Queen Elizabeth I, shows her usual flare in dealing with murder and intrigue in Buckley's fifth engrossing Elizabethan mystery (after 2000's To Ruin a Queen). In the early summer of...
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Fiona Buckley, Author . Scribner $24 (277p) ISBN 978-0-7432-3751-2
Smooth modern prose with only an occasional "strewth" for period flavor and an ingenious but easy-to-follow plot lift British author Buckley's seventh historical (after 2002's A Pawn for a Queen
) to feature Ursula Blanchard, half-sis
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Fiona Buckley, Author . Scribner $24 (288p) ISBN 978-0-7432-3752-9
British author Buckley's excellent eighth Ursula Blanchard novel offers fine writing and deft plotting while vividly bringing the past to life. Where earlier volumes used historical mysteries that have sparked heated debate over the centuries,...
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Fiona Buckley, Author Scribner Book Company $21 (288p) ISBN 978-0-684-83841-0
Buckley makes use of some happily anachronistic narration in a lively mystery series kickoff set in 1560. Impoverished but well-born, Ursula Blanchard is blessed not only with the sharp tongue and quick wit characteristic of Elizabethan England but...
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Fiona Buckley, Author Scribner Book Company $21 (304p) ISBN 978-0-684-83842-7
Elizabethan sleuth Ursula Blanchard returns in a worthy follow-up to To Shield the Queen (1997). Ursula, lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth I, is the only female spy employed by the queen's right-hand man, William Cecil. A widow with a small...
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Fiona Buckley, Author Scribner Book Company $23 (288p) ISBN 978-0-684-86268-2
Readers with a taste for melodramatic suspense will relish this solid historical, the fourth in the Ursula Blanchard series from the pseudonymous Buckley. Upon learning that her daughter has been kidnapped, Ursula hastens home from France to England.
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Fiona Buckley, Author Scribner Book Company $23 (352p) ISBN 978-0-684-86267-5
A woman with a '90s attitude living in the 1560s--that's Ursula Blanchard, the heroine of Buckley's jaunty historical mystery series, of which this is the third entry (after To Shield the Queen and The Doublet Affair). This time out, the 27-year-old
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Fiona Buckley, Author Scribner Book Company $24 (288p) ISBN 978-0-7432-0265-7
In Fiona Buckley's A Pawn for a Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's Court, the sixth in the series, the queen's faithful lady-in-waiting and spy, now widowed, finds herself in the midst of the power struggle between...
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Fiona Buckley. Severn/Crème de la Crime, $28.95 (240p) ISBN 978-1-78029-014-0
At the start of Buckley’s solid ninth Elizabethan historical (after 2004’s The Siren Queen), Mark Easton, a messenger, brings news to Elizabeth I about a plot to free Mary, queen of Scots, from captivity in England. Easton also has a personal...
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Fiona Buckley. Severn/Crème de la Crime, $28.95 (240p) ISBN 978-1-78029-024-9
Buckley’s well-paced 10th Tudor mystery featuring Ursula Blanchard (after Queen Without a Crown) finds Ursula, former lady-in-waiting and half-sister to Elizabeth I, happily married to her third husband, Hugh Stannard, and preparing for her daughter’
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Fiona Buckley. Severn/Crème de la Crime, $28.95 (224p) ISBN 978-1-78029-040-9
An appealing heroine makes up for some choppy pacing in Buckley’s well-constructed 11th Tudor mystery (after 2012’s Queen’s Bounty). In 1571, Ursula Blanchard, half-sister to the queen, is planning a quiet country life after the death of her devoted
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Fiona Buckley. Severn/Crème de la Crime, $28.95 (240p) ISBN 978-1-78029-057-7
Buckley’s engaging 12th Tudor whodunit featuring Ursula Blanchard (after 2013’s A Rescue for a Queen) smoothly blends history and fiction to depict the precariousness of life in 1573 England. Ursula, Queen Elizabeth’s half-sister, wants nothing more
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Fiona Buckley. Severn/Crème de la Crime, $29.95 (240p) ISBN 978-1-78029-076-8
In Buckley’s riotous but initially labored 13th Elizabethan mystery (after 2014’s A Traitor’s Tears), foreign policy matters trigger the action, but the focus is on domestic relationships. Ursula Blanchard, a half-sister of Elizabeth I, refuses one...
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Fiona Buckley. Crème de la Crime, $28.99 (224p) ISBN 978-1-78029-091-1
Buckley’s outstanding 14th Tudor mystery (after 2015’s A Perilous Alliance) takes Ursula Blanchard, the intelligent, resourceful gentlewoman with a secret family connection to Elizabeth I, to an unofficial convent in a remote corner of the Yorkshire
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Fiona Buckley. Crème de la Crime, $28.99 (224p) ISBN 978-1-78029-097-3
Ursula Blanchard, the secret half-sister of Elizabeth I, struggles to deal with darkening conspiracies both at home and at Hampton Court, in Buckley’s dramatic 15th Tudor mystery (after 2016’s Heretic’s Creed). In her last outing, Ursula faced...
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Fiona Buckley. Crème de la Crime, $28.99 (224p) ISBN 978-1-78029-103-1
In Buckley’s uneven 16th Tudor mystery (after 2017’s A Deadly Betrothal), gentlewoman Ursula Blanchard’s nine-year-old son, Harry, disappears one day while riding near her house in the English countryside. The subsequent frantic search triggers...
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Fiona Buckley. Crème de la Crime, $28.99 (224p) ISBN 978-1-78029-113-0
Set in 1582, Buckley’s engrossing 16th Ursula Blanchard mystery (after 2017’s A Deadly Betrothal) finds the widowed half-sister of Elizabeth I—now going by Ursula Stannard, the surname of her late husband—working once again for the queen’s spymaster,
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Fiona Buckley. Crème de la Crime, $28.99 (240p) ISBN 978-1-78029-133-8
Set in 1586, Buckley’s gripping 18th mystery featuring wealthy widow Ursula Blanchard (after 2019’s A Web of Silk) takes Ursula, the half-sister of Elizabeth I, to Devon to visit relatives—which gives Sir Francis Walsingham, the queen’s secretary of
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Fiona Buckley. Severn, $28.99 (240p) ISBN 978-0-7278-5050-8
Early in Buckley’s atmospheric 19th Tudor mystery (after 2020’s The Scent of Danger), Ursula Blanchard, a prosperous widow and half-sister to Elizabeth I, receives a strange visitor at her Surrey home. Etheldreda Hope has come from the village of...
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Fiona Buckley. Severn, $28.99 (224p) ISBN 978-0-7278-5086-7
At the start of Buckley’s solid 20th Tudor mystery featuring occasional secret agent Ursula Blanchard (after 2021’s Forest of Secrets), Queen Elizabeth, Ursula’s half-sister, summons her to a meeting at St. James Palace in the spring of 1588. Should
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Fiona Buckley. Severn, $29.99 (256p) ISBN 978-1-4483-0922-1
Set in 1589, Buckley’s tense 21st Tudor mystery (after Shadow of Spain) finds Ursula Stannard—half-sister of Elizabeth I and an occasional spy—with nothing more on her mind than making an appearance at the wedding of a tenant’s beautiful daughter,...
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Fiona Buckley. Severn, $31.99 (256p) ISBN 978-1-4483-1059-3
In Buckley’s tense 22nd Ursula Blanchard mystery (after 2022’s Golden Cargoes), Elizabeth I’s resourceful half-sister and lady-in-waiting is rattled by enemies from her past. At the outset, Ursula is riding high in her late-Tudor milieu: she’s a...
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