1635: The Cannon Law

So another 1632 book. I went out and bought it a few days ago and burned right through. I spent six hours last night reading it. It's that good. Like the others, it's not a particularly deep or intellectual book. But what it is is a fun political thriller.

The book before this in the continuity ended with the Pope declaring his neutrality in the wars of religion, which was a great boon for our heroes since it badly damaged the case of the mostly-Catholic antagonists. But the last book also had a very bad romance running through it. There's essentially no romance in this book at all. A cardinal working for Spain exceeds his instructions and tries to depose the pope and become the new pope. This would be bad for our heroes, who have just managed to break up the alliance against them. Towards the end, open warfare breaks out.

It's good to see after The Baltic War that things can still go wrong for our heroes, and they go badly wrong. The only groaner is that having just freed those good guys in enemy hands over the course of the Baltic War, we're right back to having some more imprisoned. And the same guy is being sent after them. Come on. I read that plot already. Twice.

As I mentioned in my past review, I've gotten more and more bothered by the absence of gay people in the series. The author went out of his way to get a large cross-section of American diversity into the series, but there hasn't even been an intimation that someone might be gay in all the books...until now. There are two references in The Cannon Law. The first is to a cardinal who the point of view character of the moment thought came across as pretty gay. It was treated neutrally and came across about what you'd expect for someone who had no real issues with gay people.

The second is less flattering, but the protagonist here is maybe eighteen and under a lot of stress. He's being shot at and his wife has been captured by the enemy. One of his early modern Italian friends starts up with a mocking falsetto. The guy laughs, but says he feels guilty about doing so. Well, ok. It's a step. It would be weird if every time homosexuality came up the responses were uniformly positive and he has some pangs of conscience about the fact.

Maybe in another dozen books we'll have an actual gay character show up.