Heresy

Heresy is a historical mystery novel by S. J. Parris, published in 2010 and the first novel in the series about Giordano Bruno.

The book opens in 1583, in an England that is suspicious, watched and inclined to see conspiracy everywhere, but which offers a haven to a radical former monk. Giordano Bruno has left Italy and the Inquisition, taking with him views about astronomy and the possibility of life on other worlds that would be dangerous to hold at home. In London he comes to the notice of Francis Walsingham, the queen's chief intelligence officer, who sends him to Oxford, where the university's scholars are divided over matters of faith and where the deaths of several of them are not being investigated properly. Bruno works between the two worlds he knows, the library and the interrogation room, to find out who is killing the men who were once his argumentative colleagues.

Parris writes the Bruno novels as historical crime fiction, and the books follow the same character through a Europe where new science and old authority are in open conflict.