Poison

I have been unable to find a home page for author Sara Poole although the publisher has a page for her. This is a well written historical novel set in 1492 as Rodrigo Borgia is pulling the strings to try and obtain the Papacy. Francesca Giordano has just murdered a man in order to take his place as the Borgia family's official poisoner. She is still young--in her late teens--but has been at the side of her widowed father, the former poisoner for the Borgias, and learned his herb craft and more. To explain, the poisoner's job is technically to keep the family safe from efforts to kill them through poisoning, which was apparently a popular means of getting rid of one's enemies. But she has also just seen her father die from a brutal beating and feels that patriarch Rodrigo Borgia has acted insufficiently to find the killer or killers. Only if she is in a position of power can she assure her own future and possibly find those responsible. So she kills the Spaniard that Borgia has hired to replace her father and presents herself to Borgia as the replacement. Her audacity and competence, which could have as easily gotten her executed, apparently strikes a cord with Rodrigo and she is now official.
Little does she realize what Borgia had had her father working on before he died. When Francesco attempts to track down her father's final diaries, she is led to the Jewish ghetto of Rome, where the exiles from the Inquisition in Spain are overcrowding an already intolerable situation of filth, starvation and disease. The people she meets there become real to her as she learns that the current Pope plans to sign a similar edict evicting them not only from Rome, but from all Christian lands. It would mean certain death for thousands. If Borgia became Pope, however, the Jews would be spared--if only because he needs the money of wealthy Jewish merchants to buy his way into office once Innocent is dead.
This book is noteworthy for its more sympathetic portrayals of Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia. I have now ordered the HBO series, The Borgias, from Netflix to see how they portray this infamous family. Excellent creation of time, place, characters and political intrigues. If you weren't put off the Catholic church before, this may change your mind. Corruption does not begin to describe the machinations of cardinals and pope. I am keen to read the two subsequent novels in the series.