As with many first books of a series, the story is very busy telling how these disparate individuals will come together, because it seems by the end of the book that these five people form the basis of the Order of Darkness series. Thus begins Luca’s journey with his servant, Frieze, and his clerk (and possible spy), Brother Peter.Ĭhangeling tells the story of Luca’s first task as an Inquirer for the Order and leads him to discover the Lady Isolde and her companion, Ishraq. The end of days are coming, the Inquisitor says, and we must arm against them. The Inquisitor decides immediately to send Luca out into the world of Christendom looking for mysteries, heresies and sins, to explain them where possible, and defeat them where he can. Once he is questioned (with the fear of the Inquisistion firmly instilled in him), Luca reveals his insightful and inquisitive intelligence and his affinity for numbers and their patterns. Be sure to tell the truth: you would be a fool to die for a lie.”

Your life hangs in the balance here, and you cannot guess what answers I would prefer.

Luca is summoned before a Papal Inquisitor-a man simply known as the lord-and told: “You must not lie to me. Luca Vero is a young initiate to the priesthood who has been banished from his monastery for the heretical act of questioning the veracity of the monastery’s shards of the True Cross. Changeling, the first in the series to be known as The Order of Darkness, is set just prior to this time period, at the end of the 15th century in Italy. Gregory is well known for her books on Renaissance England ( The Other Boleyn Girl, The Virgin’s Lover). While waiting for her new book, The Kingmaker’s Daughter, to arrive on the holds shelf for me, I have been trying out her new series for teens, The Order of Darkness. I am unabashedly in love with stories of Medieval and Renaissance Europe, so it is no real surprise that I love Philippa Gregory. With the first book in her Order of Darkness series, Philippa Gregory sets a tale of romance, intrigue, and Inquisition in the startling and delightful ambiance of pre-Enlightenment Europe.

Changeling by Philippa Gregory