The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez cover art

The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez

The Chronicles of Christoval Alvarez, Volume 1

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez

By: Ann Swinfen
Narrated by: Jan Cramer
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £18.99

Buy Now for £18.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

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

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Bookseller's Tale cover art
Cathedral of Bones cover art
This Rough Ocean cover art
The Unquiet Bones cover art
The Seeker cover art
Songbird cover art
The Wolves of Savernake cover art
State of Treason cover art
A Plague on Both Your Houses cover art
Apprentice - Scarlet City - Part I cover art
The Ashes of London cover art
The Queen's Head cover art
The Passage cover art
An Honourable Thief cover art
Legacy cover art
To Ruin a Queen cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
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

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Returned this book, and won't be listening to any more in the series. As a huge CJ Sansom fan I was hoping to have found another gripping historical series, but was sadly disappointed. Lacks depth, detail or any real characterisation; what might be described as a 'potboiler'.

Disappointingly trite

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.