The Bloodless Boy

eBook, 464 pages

Published Nov. 15, 2021 by Melville House.

ISBN:: 978-1-61219-939-9

(1 review)

Part Wolf Hall, part The Name of the Rose , a riveting new literary thriller set in Restoration London, with a cast of real historic figures, set against the actual historic events and intrigues of the returned king and his court …

The City of London, 1678. New Year’s Day. Twelve years have passed since the Great Fire ripped through the City. Eighteen since the fall of Oliver Cromwell and the restoration of a King. London is gripped by hysteria, and rumors of Catholic plots and sinister foreign assassins abound.

When the body of a young boy drained of his blood is discovered on the snowy bank of the Fleet River, Robert Hooke, the Curator of Experiments at the just-formed Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge, and his assistant Harry Hunt, are called in to explain such a ghastly finding—and whether it's part of a plot against the king. They …

Part Wolf Hall, part The Name of the Rose , a riveting new literary thriller set in Restoration London, with a cast of real historic figures, set against the actual historic events and intrigues of the returned king and his court …

The City of London, 1678. New Year’s Day. Twelve years have passed since the Great Fire ripped through the City. Eighteen since the fall of Oliver Cromwell and the restoration of a King. London is gripped by hysteria, and rumors of Catholic plots and sinister foreign assassins abound.

When the body of a young boy drained of his blood is discovered on the snowy bank of the Fleet River, Robert Hooke, the Curator of Experiments at the just-formed Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge, and his assistant Harry Hunt, are called in to explain such a ghastly finding—and whether it's part of a plot against the king. They soon learn it is not the first bloodless boy to have been discovered.

Meanwhile, that same morning Henry Oldenburg, the Secretary of the Royal Society, blows his brains out, and a disgraced Earl is released from the Tower of London, bent on revenge against the King, Charles II.

Wary of the political hornet’s nest they are walking into – and using scientific evidence rather than paranoia in their pursuit of truth – Hooke and Hunt must discover why the boy was murdered, and why his blood was taken.

The Bloodless Boy is an absorbing literary thriller that introduces two new indelible heroes to historical crime fiction. It is also a powerfully atmospheric recreation of the darkest corners of Restoration London, where the Court and the underworld seem to merge, even as the light of scientific inquiry is starting to emerge …

1 edition

Annie the Book reviewed The Bloodless Boy by Robert J. Lloyd

The Bloodless Boy, by Robert J. Lloyd

5 stars

Set more than 100 years before the founding of the Metropolitan Police and Scotland Yard, Robert J. Lloyd’s astonishingly gripping mystery, The Bloodless Boy, features two natural philosophers (scientists before we had the term scientist) investigating a fiendish series of murders in London. On a very cold January morning in 1678, Robert Hooke and his former assistant, Harry Hunt, are charged by Justice of the Peace Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey to find out who is responsible for the death of a boy. Why two natural philosophers? Well, the boy was found entirely drained of blood. Who better to find out what really happened than two people dedicated to Reason, in a city on the edge of anti-Catholic fervor and superstition? Both men have followed their intellectual curiosity wherever it might take them: meteorology, cryptography, medicine, chemistry, mathematics, physics, microscopy, geology, and more. To them, it’s all Natural Philosophy instead …

Set more than 100 years before the founding of the Metropolitan Police and Scotland Yard, Robert J. Lloyd’s astonishingly gripping mystery, The Bloodless Boy, features two natural philosophers (scientists before we had the term scientist) investigating a fiendish series of murders in London. On a very cold January morning in 1678, Robert Hooke and his former assistant, Harry Hunt, are charged by Justice of the Peace Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey to find out who is responsible for the death of a boy. Why two natural philosophers? Well, the boy was found entirely drained of blood. Who better to find out what really happened than two people dedicated to Reason, in a city on the edge of anti-Catholic fervor and superstition? Both men have followed their intellectual curiosity wherever it might take them: meteorology, cryptography, medicine, chemistry, mathematics, physics, microscopy, geology, and more. To them, it’s all Natural Philosophy instead of the narrow fields of later scientists. Which, I suppose, does make them good potential investigators, even if they’ve never actually dabbled in forensics...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.