"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies"

This is a very clever book, written from four different perspectives, of participants in the events, but it left me dissatisfied, as I felt no personal attraction to any of the four characters. When I started reading the second account I found it pretty confusing, as it seemed initially to be talking about an entirely different set of events.
If you are the sort of reader who delights in untangling events and working out 'who dunnit' then you may well enjoy this period crime drama, set in the reign of Charles the second, with all the political intrigues, complexities of religious dissent and backroom dealings that followed the Commonwealth era. It is not, to my mind, a book where the author attempts to involve you emotionally with his characters, and I am afraid that is what I seek in fiction.
What the author does achieve supremely well is to recreate the period with detail and well-researched facts - may of the protagonists - political, society, medical, scientific figures - are real historical characters, and short bios of them are given at the end of the book.