The second book in the Master of Defence series, featuring Elizabethan sleuth Tom Musgrave.

It is 1594; Tom Musgrave snatches a beautiful girl from under the feet of a mob playing football on London Bridge. But the football has vanished. In its place, a severed head is rolling down into Southwark, into the jurisdiction of Tom’s old friend, the Bishop’s Bailiff Talbot Law, who now must investigate.

The head has fallen from the Great Stone Gateway, where the heads of recently executed traitors are displayed. But the decapitated victim is no traitor and her head, like her sex, is markedly different from the others up there.

This is the second in the Master of Defence series in which Tonkin takes us back to Shakespeare’s London. Here he shows us the mean streets – and the monsters that inhabited them – from the ancient timbers of London Bridge where the plague-laden rats still scurried, to the shadowed corridors of Westminster and Whitehall where spies and statesmen grew drunk with secret power.