I do love a big huge, complicated, tricky, fiendish story, and this one is big enough to stand no less than four retellings of the same events, only going over the same ground to put an entirely different spin on them. The death of an Oxford don is apparently at the centre of the mystery, but it soon becomes apparent that the conpsiracies, agendas and motivations are layered, hidden, twist back on themselves and are, in at least one case, quite irrational. The period-accurate misogyny is a bit hard to take at times, but drives the plot as much as the conspiracies and secrets, and there is also period-accurate philosophy, gropings towards the scentific method and devout faiths of various stripes. The narrators are unreliable, except, I think we are supposed to accept - thematically laid out by the Francis Bacon epigrams - the fourth. Perhaps four unreliables requiring the reader to piece an aproximation of the truth from their co-relation, might have been a bit too high of a challenge for autor and readers alike. Like Janice Hallet only historical.