Reinvigorate Your Love For Historical Fiction With ‘A Tip For The Hangman’

Allison Epstein’s confident debut re-examines Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe

In Over Coffee, writer, reader, and haphazard reviewer Angela Lashbrook chats with authors about their recent books, and quizzes them on their hot breakfast takes.

Christopher Marlowe — aspiring poet, prolific smoker, poor cobbler’s son— is finishing up his last year on scholarship at Cambridge University when he receives a visit from Queen Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. Walsingham has a proposition for Kit: dispatch to Yorkshire to collect information about Mary Stuart, once the Queen of Scots. British intelligence has reason to believe that Mary is amassing support for a revolt against the House of Tudor, and they need someone like Kit to lurk around Sheffield Manor, where Mary resides, and uncover the details of the plot.

“When I asked Master Norgate to recommend a student who might serve, he spoke of you at length. Of your ambition. Your persuasive rhetoric. Your inability to follow basic rules of conduct, manifested everywhere from the chapel to the alehouse.”

And so Kit heads to Yorkshire to work as a servant in Mary’s household, where he meets traitors, enemies, and people…