Giordano Bruno (SJ Parris) Books in Order

These are the Giordano Bruno mysteries as seen through the name on their covers, SJ Parris. The books are built around a simple idea: take a real sixteenth century philosopher who was burned for heresy and imagine what might have happened if, for a few dangerous years, he had also worked as a spy and investigator.

Bruno begins the series as a Dominican friar on the run from the Inquisition and ends it as a seasoned agent who has seen most of Europe's courts from the inside. In Heresy he arrives in England and is sent undercover to Oxford, where he is meant to debate new ideas about the cosmos while quietly exposing a Catholic conspiracy and a series of brutal campus murders. Prophecy moves him into the glittering yet precarious world of Elizabeth I's court, where astrologers whisper that the stars foretell the queen's death and someone is killing her maids of honour.

Sacrilege returns Bruno to the shabby streets and holy sites of Canterbury, where his attempt to clear an old lover of a murder charge tangles with rumours about the relics of Thomas Becket and missing boys. In Treachery he sails west to Plymouth with Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Francis Drake. A suspicious death aboard Drake's ship sends Bruno into taverns, dockside alleys and brothels as England prepares for open conflict with Spain.

The action then shifts across the Channel. Conspiracy finds Bruno in Paris at the court of Henry III, where pamphleteers, courtiers and fanatical members of the Catholic League jostle for control while a chain of killings seems to point toward the French succession. Execution returns him to London on the eve of the Babington plot, embedding him deep inside a circle of young Catholic gentlemen who dream of freeing Mary, Queen of Scots and toppling Elizabeth.

Parris has also written shorter prequels, gathered in The Dead of Winter, which follow Bruno in Italy before he ever reaches England. As a young friar in Naples he assists at an illicit autopsy and uncovers a murder; later stories place him among secretive scholars and alchemists. Alchemy extends his journey to Prague, where he is sent as Elizabeth's agent to a court obsessed with the philosopher's stone and riven by religious tension after the death of an imperial alchemist.

The books combine the pleasures of a classic mystery with the pace of an espionage thriller. Readers can expect coded messages, deadly theological disputes, tavern brawls, prison cells and the occasional flash of genuinely unsettling violence. At the centre stands Bruno himself, witty, impatient and unwilling to pretend that certainty is easy, which makes him the perfect guide through a world that punishes doubt.