I loved this book. Historical fiction always draws me in. I learned more than I wanted to about codes and cyphers, so much so that I started skipping those parts. Other than that a good story; a little romance, a little violence (it was a war after all), some suspense, a very likeable hero and a thoroughly evil bad guy. What's not to like! ( )

An English Civil War mystery set largely in the garrisoned town of Oxford. It’s an enjoyable read with a little bit of everything: history, code-breaking, battles, murder, imprisonment, food, romance, revenge and a lot of mud. The royal cryptographer Thomas Hill is an interesting character. As a pacifist with no real leaning towards either side in the war, he initially agrees to help the royalist cause for largely impersonal reasons – bringing an early end to the war – but as events progress, matters become more and more personal.

Read my full review at Euro Crime: http://eurocrime.co.uk/reviews/The_Kings_Spy.html ( )

An English Civil War mystery set largely in the garrisoned town of Oxford. It’s an enjoyable read with a little bit of everything: history, code-breaking, battles, murder, imprisonment, food, romance, revenge and a lot of mud. The royal cryptographer Thomas Hill is an interesting character. As a pacifist with no real leaning towards either side in the war, he initially agrees to help the royalist cause for largely impersonal reasons – bringing an early end to the war – but as events progress, matters become more and more personal.

Read my full review at Euro Crime: http://eurocrime.co.uk/reviews/The_Kings_Spy.html ( )

Thomas Hill is an unassuming bookseller in the Hampshire town of Romsey at the start of the English Civil War. With his background of an Oxford education in mathematics and natural philosophy, he is called upon by his old friend and tutor Abraham Fletcher to come to Oxford to replace the king’s murdered cryptographer and thus help the Royalist cause. One day the guards manage to intercept a secret and heavily encrypted message to the Parliamentarians, and it falls to Thomas to solve the puzzle. Using all his skills and intuition, and suffering personal losses in the process, he manages to decode the message and expose a traitor in their midst.

This is the first volume in a trilogy featuring the unlikely hero Thomas Hill. The first 100 pages or so are a little slow, while introducing the characters and setting the scene in quiet, peaceful Romsey before the soldiers descend, and Oxford, a town unrecognisable from Thomas’s student days now that the king has made it his headquarters. Thomas is a very likeable man who abhors violence and refuses to take sides in the war but feels it is his duty to help his old friend Abraham and hopes that, by serving the King, he may bring an early end to the war. We see the poverty of the inhabitants and the squalor of the Oxford streets through his eyes, and experience the senseless slaughter of the Battle of Newbury. We feel his frustration as he repeatedly grapples with the encrypted message and fails, until he finds the inspiration he needs in a rather unexpected place. I still think that he was extremely lucky to correctly guess the solution to the second encrypted message, and the – pretty obvious – villain predictably succumbs to the temptation to inform his incapacitated victim how clever and superior to him he has been, but those are minor quibbles. I really enjoyed the lessons on cryptography that come as part of the course of reading this novel, and I would encourage anyone not familiar with Simon Singh’s The Code Book to read up on simple substitution ciphers, Caesar shifts, frequency analysis, nomenclators and the Vigenère cipher to appreciate the subject matter more fully.

I look forward to reading the next volume in the Thomas Hill trilogy, even though I’m not sure whether the author might have anything new to add as this first volume could very well stand on its own.

(This review was written for Amazon's Vine programme.) ( )

At the height of the English Civil War, bookseller and mathematician Thomas Hill is summoned from this home in Hampshire to serve as a cryptographer at King Charles I's Court in Oxford. Thomas would much rather stay at home peacefully with his family and his books, but has no choice but to become embroiled in the chaotic and violent conflict between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists. He soon finds that as well as deciphering coded messages, he must uncover the truth about traitors within the King's Court.

The King's Spy is a meticulously-researched novel that doesn't overburden the reader with unnecessary detail. The research is woven into the fabric of the story and at times confounds what we think we know about the English Civil War and points out the truth of what went on. Whilst the plot is relatively simple, the book is written in a brilliantly atmospheric way, where all the characters stand out and seem to become real in your imagination.

I guess the best test when reading the first novel of a trilogy is whether the reader would seek out the second book. I certainly will be looking out for Hill's next book. ( )