The Point of Death — Peter Tonkin

The first book in The Master of Defence series, featuring Elizabethan sleuth Tom Musgrave London, 1594. It's the opening night of Romeo and Juliet and Mercutio is murdered in the middle of the play - but it's real blood that flows. Master of Defence Tom Musgrave is hired by the theatre owners to solve the case as quickly and quietly as possible. The theatres have only just reopened after two years of plague, and there are fortunes as well as lives at risk. But as Tom plunges into the mean streets of London in that threatening, thunderous Summer, he swiftly finds himself hunted as well as hunter - for he has jumped blindly into a cat's cradle of murderous intrigue that has already claimed Marlowe and Walsingham. As the shattered remnants of England's first Secret Service split into two lethally opposed camps, the blood begins to flow everywhere from the stinking stews of Southwark to the gilded halls of Westminster. And it will require all Musgrave's skill to cut his way to the dark heart of the truth and walk away again.