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The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez

The Chronicles of Christoval Alvarez, Volume 1

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The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez

By: Ann Swinfen
Narrated by: Jan Cramer
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About this listen

It is the year 1586. England is awash with traitors, plotting to assassinate the Queen and bring about a foreign invasion. The young physician Christoval Alvarez, a refugee from the horrors of the Portuguese Inquisition, is coerced into becoming a code-breaker and agent in Sir Francis Walsingham's secret service. In the race to thwart the plot, who will triumph - the ruthless conspirators or the equally ruthless State?

©2014 Ann Swinfen (P)2016 Ann Swinen Action & Adventure Historical Mystery Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Fiction
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I've come to this series having first finished the "Oxford Medieval Mystery" series which I really enjoyed. This first book has been something of a disappointment by comparison and I'm not at all sure that I'll finish the series but I'll give the next one a chance and see how it goes.

I got to the end thinking that there were several major questions that hadn't been addressed at all. I much prefer to get the back story rather than just be given a bald fact without any sort of explanation or expansion.

It hasn't gripped me - see how I go with the next.

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This is a well written and unusual look inside the times of Elizabethan England. There is much to enjoy and I will certainly try volume 2, but I find it rather difficult to believe that a young woman could continue to pretend to be a young man for so long! And I do wish the narrator world stop reading in a rather sing song fashion in between conversations...

An intriguing twist right from the start

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The terror (and the implausibility) of a combined 1) woman 2) physician 3) hidden Sephardic Jew simply was difficult to swallow.
The tone of the story seemed young adult to me. While I am aware that there were, quite correctly, sephardim who posed as Portuguese to avoid the grasp of Spain and secretly existing in England, the combination of the 3 factors simply was nonsensical. ALL Jews were orthodox at that time, including hidden, converso and anusim jews. They would not tolerate gender bending, eating oysters without a thought or being a physician.

Being a woman pretending to be a man would have been trouble, being a jew would have been a death sentence until Oliver Cromwell reversed national policy. Why swinfen felt the need to stress the cross gender issue was gilding the lilly.

Just too historiclly over the top for me. PS I am a Sephardic jew and happen to have lived in Portugal for the past 4 years.

Implausible

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the flow of the interlinked threads of the tail coloured by description of setting.
entrlancing .

continuation of storyline

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Sadly the plot was predictable, the characters pretty one dimensional and the twist could be seen from page one. As mentioned by another reader, the narration was made uncomfortable by the sound of swallowing.

So predictable

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