SJ Parris (Giordano Bruno) Books in Order

This series view filters S J Parris down to the Giordano Bruno adventures alone, so you can follow one character's journey without the distraction of pen names or other contemporary work. It starts with a young monk in Italy and ends with a seasoned agent who has seen the inside of more courts, prisons and taverns than he ever expected.

In the early stories Bruno is still in his Dominican habit, working in the libraries and sickrooms of Naples. A novella such as The Secret Dead and the other pieces gathered in The Dead of Winter show him helping with an illicit autopsy, stumbling over suspicious deaths and discovering that his hunger for knowledge can be as dangerous as any weapon. These tales make it clear that his career as an investigator begins long before England.

When the first full length novel, Heresy, opens, Bruno has already fled the Inquisition and washed up at Oxford under the protection of a foreign ambassador. Officially he is there to argue about the structure of the universe. Unofficially he is keeping his eyes and ears open for Walsingham, Elizabeth I's spymaster, and trying to work out who is killing members of a tight knit academic community.

From there the books push him closer to the centre of power. In Prophecy he walks the corridors of the royal palace while rumours of astrologers and omens swirl around the queen. In Sacrilege he is back among the crowded streets and holy places of Canterbury, dragged into a scandal that mixes stolen relics with the desperate attempts of a woman he once loved to clear her name. Treachery sends him to Plymouth and onto Drake's ship, where a death at sea exposes rivalries that reach beyond the harbour.

The later novels widen the map even further. Conspiracy plants him in the uneasy court of Henry III of France, where pamphleteers, fanatics and foreign agents compete to shape the future of the crown. In Execution he returns to London on the brink of the Babington plot, threading his way through a group of young Catholic conspirators whose dreams of martyrdom collide with Walsingham's cold calculations.

Seen in this light, the Giordano Bruno novels are less a string of separate cases and more a single long story about a man testing how far he can push his ideas and his loyalties before the world pushes back.

This page helps you stay with Bruno wherever he goes, lining up the books and novellas in order so you can trace his arc from wide eyed scholar to wary survivor. Whether you choose to read straight through or dip in at a particular setting, you will find the same blend of codes, secret meetings, theological arguments and very human motives.