The Saracen’s Mark

London and Marrakesh, 1593. Robert Cecil sends Nicholas Shelby across the sea to Morocco after one of his informers, an English factor in the Barbary trade, stops reporting. Nicholas travels under the respectable cover of studying Moorish medicine, but the voyage exposes him to piracy, slavery and a commercial world in which English security depends partly on trade with Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur’s realm. In Marrakesh he must discover what the missing agent learned and why powerful interests want that knowledge buried.

Bianca Merton remains on Bankside as plague spreads through London, placing the Jackdaw and its community under a different kind of siege. The alternating investigations gradually connect disease, murder, trade and international conspiracy. Perry uses the story to open the series beyond England, contrasting medical practice in London with the more sophisticated institutions Nicholas encounters in Morocco and grounding the adventure in the real diplomatic relationship between Elizabeth I’s government and the Saadi sultanate.