Flint and Dennis's solid follow-up to 1634: The Galileo Affair (2004), also set in Renaissance Italy, offers a deliciously Machiavellian plot. The temporally displaced modern Americans from Grantsville, W.Va., having met with a surprisingly friendly reception from Pope Urban VIII, who views with favor some of the 20th-century reforms instituted by the Holy See, run afoul of the Spanish inquisitor Cardinal Gaspar Borja y Velasco. Borja regards Urban's failure to condemn the whole lot to the stake as proof that the pope is unfit to sit on the throne of St. Peter, and believes that Spain's political and military power has earned it—and him—the right to pre-eminence. The cardinal orchestrates a campaign of dirty tricks and rabble rousing to undermine the pontiff's capable but nepotistic family. If this novel is not as rollicking as its predecessor, that may be because there really isn't anything funny about the Spanish Inquisition, Monty Python notwithstanding. (Oct.)
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Starred Review In the strong successor to 1634: The Galileo Affair (2004), there is less theology, less humor, and far more action and bloodshed. All hell breaks loose at the behest of the insanely ambitious Cardinal Borja, who wants to extirpate American heresies and increase Spanish (and his own) control over the church. So he marches an army on Rome. In Rome are Sharon Nichols and her fiance, the inimitable Ruy Sanchez, whose November-May romance continues to be one of the high points of this alternate-history saga; and also Frank Stone and his pregnant wife, Giovanna, trying to run a low-profile committee of correspondence. The action rises to a literally thunderous climax when Ruy and Tom Simpson (sprung from the Tower of London in a novel not yet published) rescue open-minded Pope Urban VIII from a besieged Castel Sant'Angelo. Meanwhile, Frank and Giovanna are at the mercy of the Inquisition, though Spanish outrage at the crisis Borja has created gives them breathing room, at least until the next volume. Meanwhile, this is probably the strongest book in this magnificent saga since the opening volume, 1632 (2000). Roland Green
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