The Physician of London: The Second Part of the Seventeenth-Century Trilogy of Nicholas Cooke

This author knows her stuff! Reading Stephanie Cowell on London is like being there. A wonderfully evocative tale of life during Shakespeare's time. Not to be missed by those who love period fiction done expertly. A gifted writer.

Stephanie Cowell's "The Physician of London" is the second novel in a trilogy, and continues the story begun in "Nicholas Cooke." One of its themes is the tremendous conflict between religion and science during the dark era of the English Civil War. Nicholas Cooke is both a priest and a scientist. The life of the day is brilliantly, vividly described, and we relive the terrors and the joys of these insightfully, incisively wrought people, so real that we think they actually lived, and some of them are, of course, historical. The book is exciting, and filled with action as well as philosophy, and engrossing from beginning to end. Stephanie Cowell's writing is magnificent. There are lessons here, in the power struggles of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, in the search for scientific truth by Nicholas Cooke, in this tale of bigotry and corruption and love, for our own time. You will love this superb novel.--Robert Blumenfeld

When I began reading the first chapters of Nicholas Cooke, I wasn't sure I liked his character. He was so hot-tempered and didn't seem to appreciate some people as he should have. As I continued to read on into the Physician of London, and as Nicholas continued to mature into the man he became in The Physician of London, I found myself more and more involved with this man and his life. I realized that his character, his desires and dreams and his conflicts, reminded me of my own desires and dreams and conflicts. Like a good cook, Stephanie Crowell flavors the book wonderfully with the Elizabethan/Stuart atmosphere and writes in such a way as to involved the reader not only in the main character, but all the characters. She has made this reader at least impatient for the publishing of the last book in the trilogy of Nicholas.