
Critic Reviews
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Based on 3 reviews on

John M. Ford's The Scholars of Night is an extraordinary novel of technological espionage and human betrayal, weaving past and present into a web of unbearable suspense.
Nicholas Hansard is a brilliant historian at a small New England college. He specializes in Christopher Marlowe. But Hansard has a second, secret, career with The White Group, a "consulting agency" with shadowy government connections. There, he is a genius at teasing secrets out of documents old and new--to call him a code-breaker is an understatement. When Hansard's work exposes one of his closest friends as a Russian agent, and the friend then dies mysteriously, the connections seem all too clear. Shaken, Hansard turns away from his secret work to lose himself in an ancient Marlowe manuscript. Surely, a lost 400 year old play is different enough from modern murder. He is very, very wrong."[The Scholars of Night] should have been marketed like The Name of the Rose. You needed to go, 'We have a great writer who is really fucking brilliant and he has written a book that combines high and low culture.'" --Neil Gaiman
"So easy to get lured into the world of death and double-dealing. Quite an artistic job we have here by Ford, crafty and complex." -- The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter 1989. "There's a slight Tom Clancy air to the plot, but it's unmistakably a John M. Ford book. It's a technothriller in the same way that The Final Reflection is a Star Trek novel--it has all the requisite elements put together in more or less the usual way, but everything ends up at an odd angle, creating something that is entirely different." -- Science Blogs "A wonderful kaleidoscope of the imagination. --Poul Anderson "Extraordinary...both original and dazzling." -- The Cleveland Plain Dealer