Gunpowder Percy — Grace Tiffany

Grace Tiffany spins a fiction out of a nation-shaking historical event, the English Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Her early-modern protagonist Sir Thomas Percy is irresistibly drawn to London's Globe theater and the wildly popular new history plays. Inspired by the king-hating warrior Hotspur in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Percy joins a group of disaffected Catholics that includes the mysterious traveler Guido Fawkes and the rebel aristocrat Robin Catesby. The terrorist plot on which they embark is colored by nostalgia and fantasy. It's a quest not just to destroy a Protestant king, but to return the nation to a mythic medieval past.