The Scholars of Night, John M. Ford
The Scholars of Night, John M. Ford
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

The Scholars of Night

Author: John M. Ford

Narrator: John Skelley

Unabridged: 9 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 09/21/2021


Synopsis

Nicholas Hansard is a brilliant historian at a small New England college. He specializes in the life and work of Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe.

But Hansard has a second, secret career with The White Group, a “consulting agency” with shadowy government connections. There, he is a genius at teasing secrets out of documents old and new. To call him merely a code-breaker would
be an understatement.

When Hansard’s work exposes one of his closest friends as a Russian agent, and the friend then dies mysteriously, the connections seem all too clear. Shaken, Hansard turns away from his secret work to lose himself in an ancient Marlowe
manuscript. Surely, a lost four-hundred-year-old play has nothing to do with a modern-day murder.

He is, it turns out, very wrong.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Joseph

A sort of a Cold War spy thriller (published in 1988, when the Cold War was still a thing) in which an academic who participates in games of Diplomacy and occasionally does "consulting" work on the side finds himself sent to England to investigate and attempt to verify a recently-discovered "lost" p......more

Goodreads review by Rachel

A clever (perhaps too clever for its own good), twisty (ditto) post-Cold War thriller by the late, great John Ford. I think this is his only non-sff novel, though it is arguably alternate history and possibly sf of the techno-thriller variety. It juggles a lot of complex puzzle pieces, action set-pie......more

Goodreads review by Nigel

Still unwell. Ugh. John M Ford, man-about-literature, wrote a spy novel, and it is a clever, elliptical tale of game-playing and historical secrets and a plot that, quite properly, reveals a contempt and hate and fear of the world that gives us spy novels. Ford can be downright obscure in his writin......more

Read thanks to NetGalley. Well that was a completely bonkers read. When I first asked to review this, I didn't realise it was a reprinting; I'm not enough of a Ford fan to know that he's passed on. Then I read Charles Stross' introduction, in which he talks about this being published in 1988 and sett......more