Giordano Bruno Books in Order

If you want Bruno's story from his first case in England: Heresy → Prophecy → Sacrilege
If you like high stakes intrigue and plots against the queen: Prophecy → Conspiracy → Execution
If you prefer to follow his travels at sea and abroad: Treachery → Conspiracy → Execution
If you want to see Bruno's beginnings as a young friar: The Secret Dead → The Dead of Winter: Three Giordano Bruno Novellas
If you just want a quick taste of the series: The Secret Dead → Heresy

Stephanie Merritt, who also writes historical crime as S. J. Parris, was born in Surrey in 1974 and studied English at Queens' College, Cambridge, where she began reviewing books while she was still a student.

After graduating in 1996 she moved quickly into journalism, joining The Observer and becoming Deputy Literary Editor in her mid twenties, commissioning reviews, interviewing writers and learning how the book world works from the inside.

Since leaving that desk job in 2005 she has worked as a freelance critic and feature writer, contributing to newspapers and magazines such as The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, the New Statesman and others, and she appears regularly on BBC radio programmes talking about books, theatre and ideas.

Alongside the journalism she built a parallel life as a novelist. Her first book, Gaveston, a campus novel about charisma and power, won a Betty Trask Award and was followed by Real, set in the rehearsal rooms and backstage corridors of London theatre.

In 2008 she published The Devil Within, a memoir of living with depression that is frank about suicidal thoughts, therapy and the long, uneven process of learning to ask for help. The book was shortlisted for the Mind Book of the Year award and has been praised for the way it combines research with personal experience.

A few years later she brought together two things she loved, Renaissance history and crime fiction, and out of that came the Giordano Bruno novels written as S. J. Parris. Beginning with Heresy and continuing through titles such as Prophecy, Sacrilege, Treachery, Conspiracy and Execution, the series imagines the real sixteenth century philosopher Giordano Bruno as an exiled monk, heretic thinker and occasional spy drawn into murder investigations across Tudor Europe.

The Bruno books have reached bestseller lists, been translated into many languages and shortlisted for crime awards, but readers tend to talk most about the way they mix pace, political tension and small human details. A trio of novellas, collected in The Dead of Winter, follow Bruno's early years in Italy and show how his appetite for risky ideas first brings him into conflict with the authorities.

Under her own name Merritt has continued to write contemporary fiction. While You Sleep is a modern ghost story set on a remote Scottish island, where an American woman renting a house for the winter starts to doubt whether the threat she faces is supernatural, human or buried in her own past, while Storm gathers old university friends in a French wine chateau and lets long standing tensions curdle into something much darker.

Today she divides her time between fiction, journalism and speaking at festivals and events, where she often talks about both the craft of crime writing and the realities of mental health. She lives in Surrey with her son, still juggling deadlines, drafts and the next twist in Bruno's story.