Spanning the career of Renaissance man and crime solver Giordano Bruno, the three novellas collected here include The Secret Dead—in which novice monk Bruno risks the wrath of the Inquisition to find out who killed a girl at the monastery—while in The Academy of Secrets, Bruno may run afoul of a secret society of philosophers. In A Christmas Requiem, Bruno is summoned by the Pope, who is intrigued by his talent for memory games. But Rome is a den of iniquity, and Bruno will be lucky to escape the Eternal City alive.