This was the #TFBookClub choice for May/early June 2017. It is a while since I have read any historical fiction, so I was anticipatory about how I would get on with this book. I have been to Prague and seen some of the amazing historical architecture that just reeks history at every step. So I thought it would be fascinating to take a peak back in time at what might have been going on behind those heavy doors and dark windows... The start was slow, but I quite got into the plodding pace once I had worked out who each character was. I got a little bogged down at times with the variety of people in the story but they each became distinctive as the story progressed. Giblets, smells, blood, wood smoke … all the features of what I imagine a Renaissance city in Winter to have been like, they all rose from the pages. A city full of alchemists, astrologers and doctors “magická Praha” all under the rule of the unwilling emperor Rudolf. And intrigue at every turn! The story unfolded with a nice and plausible ending. I liked the mix of fictional and genuine historical characters. Overall I came away feeling, that when I next visit the city, I will have a more genuine sense of the footsteps past, that “Nothing in Prague was simple; nothing was ever as it seemed”.

Winter 1599 and Christian Stern, a naïve and over-confident young man, arrives in Prague determined to make his name at the court of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor and patron of the alchemical arts. Imagine his surprise when drunk, on his first night in the city, he stumbles across the murdered corpse of a wealthy young woman, is arrested for her murder and then adopted by the superstitious emperor as a talisman sent by God. Worse, despite his innate lack of skill or power, Stern is ordered by the emperor to find out who has murdered the girl, recently his own mistress. I confess Christian Stern is not an especially attractive protagonist, cast as he is amidst a pack of conspiring and plotting factions within the eccentric court of Rudolf. But this is what makes this an interesting and entertaining novel: the competing groups of ruthless characters, divided by religion and ambition; the bleakness of the Prague winter; the foibles of Rudolf, a man clearly unfit to rule; the seasoning of Kafkaesque hopelessness, as Stern blindly and ineffectually attempts to negotiate a way through a murderous maze. He imagines himself a ‘wolf on a leash’, but he is wrong – that description better fits another…