Will I love Fools and Mortals?

What I enjoyed most about Fools and Mortals was the bigger background and the way Cornwell brings the actors of the day to back-stage life. They are rough, hard-working and are handy with their oaths:
‘ ‘’What’s your first line?” Rust growled.
“Um…”
“Christ on his silver-painted cross! If I ever hear the word ‘um’ on this stage I will kill! I will kill! What’s your goddamned line?”

And I love the asides such as:
‘We are players, and we love an audience. Sometimes, if a play is going badly, it is easy to think of the audience as… show more.

First, an admission. It took me two attempts to read this book; the first failed because it was so unlike any of the other Cornwell books I have read; the second worked because I got over my preconceptions!

Set in Elizabethan London and focused totally on the world of the actors who make up Shakespeare's theatre, it moves from personal angst to the intrigue and double-dealing around the theft of the manuscript of Shakespeare's latest play.

As always with Cornwell, you get a sense of the world in which it is set through brief, gritty descriptions that let you get… show more.