Heresy is a good old medieval murder mystery, says Sheffield book-lover

The man is Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk, and the book in question is a banned volume by Erasmus.

So begins Heresy, the first in a historical crime series featuring Bruno as our hero and sleuth.

Leaving Erasmus festering in the loo, Bruno flees from the Inquisition and his home country.

He makes his way, via the court of Henri III in France, to Elizabethan Britain, where he’s recruited by Sir Francis Walsingham, spymaster to the Queen, to sniff out Catholics who might want to assassinate the monarch.

We follow Bruno and his friend Philip Sydney to Oxford University.

Ostensibly, they’re there to debate the nature of the universe and entertain a visiting dignitary, but Bruno is intending to sniff out some Catholics for Walsingham along the way.

Before too long, though, there’s a gruesome and suspicious death in the grounds of the college where our monk is staying – and, as if he doesn’t have enough on his plate, Bruno is pulled into solving the mystery.

As a sleuth, Bruno is like a sexy Hercule Poirot.

He has the difficulties that come with suspicion of a foreign outsider, but also benefits from the way this status disarms people into confiding in him.

And he’s charming with intellectual capabilities that exceed those of everyone around him.

What he doesn’t share with the Belgian master, though, is arrogance, or any reluctance to roll up his sleeves and get physical.

Bruno is something of a superhero in this sense, although he takes his fair share of knocks along the way as he untangles the great web of deceit, bitterness and double-dealing in Oxford and solves the murders.

Where have you been all my life, Giordano Bruno?

This is a book with a juicy historical setting, plenty of political intrigue, and a good old murder mystery.

Just mind it doesn’t get you into any trouble, though.