I was pleasantly surprised by this book, thinking it would be a straight, by the numbers romance. It's actually more a theological drama with some intrigue, a bit of romance, and adventure. The heroine, Honor, is Thomas More's ward (which provides some hokey sinful thoughts on Sir Tom's part) and she gets swept up in the Catholic vs. Protestant upheavals. The final part of the book finds Honor trapped in Leyden with John and the Anabaptists. I'm not religious at all, and I found the book very fascinating. It gripped my interest thoroughly because it was so not what I thought it would be. The only less-than-stellar parts involved Honor & More, towards the beginning and then at the end. The scenes were stilted and jarring to the rest of the book. The relationship between Honor and Thornleigh, the hero, is based on business and running an underground of sorts. Not conventional in the slightest!
It was an age of ambition, greed and excess, when King Henry VIII of England let no law of God or man stand the path of his desires. This was the royal court where young Honor Larke was lady-in-waiting to the queen Henry would move heaven and earth to divorce in favor of his sultry mistress, Anne Boleyn. This was the struggle in which Honor had to take sides, as she moved from being a pawn to being a player in a game of power, passion and perfidy...a dangerous game in which a single mistake would mean certain death.
