A Verse to Murder

London, 13 January 1599. Poet and politician Edmund Spenser is found dead in his King Street lodgings. Tom Musgrave, his friend and fencing tutor, doubts that the death was natural and begins tracing poison, black magic, political grudges and threats connected to Spenser’s writings. Particular danger surrounds Mother Hubberd’s Tale, a satire that still implicates powerful men.

The Earl of Essex arranges an exceptionally elaborate funeral only days later, compressing Tom’s investigation into a public spectacle with political meaning. Manuscripts, patrons and enemies offer different accounts of what Spenser’s verse exposed. This supplied record is book six of the Tom Musgrave sequence; book five, A Stage for Murder, is missing from the export and has not been created.