The Sun King Conspiracy

These weeks, I seem to be reading French history backwards: after a book on the last months of Marie-Antoinette, I read a historical novel corresponding to the time she arrived in Versailles, and now one about Louis XIV! This historical mystery The Sun King Conspiracy reads like a saga.

The first pages open up with a secret meeting in Rome between six people, one of them being François d’Orbay, one on the key architects working on building Fouquet’s castle at Vaux. Powerful chief minister and Cardinal Mazarin (also Louis XIV’s godfather) is very sick, and this time seems perfect to implement something contained in a secret document.
But this group has enemies, and the secret ends up being stolen, with coded documents containing two other secrets, all three potential opportunities to start a major upheaval against monarchy, at least the way it has been lived so far. Will the group manage to recover the secret and put their plans into action for the sake of France?

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