Carl Becker would be rather proud of Detective Grant—rather than a bespectacled academic pondering a weighty tome, the historian hero of Daughter of Time is a gruff, battered, longtime veteran of Scotland Yard who by his own admission gave little and less thought to history after his schooling. However, he finds himself unraveling a mystery of a rather different sort when a portrait of Richard III makes him question everything he thought he knew about the key.

Grant’s attempts to discover the truth behind Richard are quite interesting, demonstrating many historian’s techniques and thought processes, all from his hospital bed, with the aid of his American friend Brent. So too does he demonstrate the pitfalls of historical accounts relying on one another, with the case of More’s inaccurate portrayal of Richard being used by everyone else after him and thus tainting the truth of the man.