The Slicing Edge of Death — Judith Cook

In the tumultuous world of Elizabethan theater, Shakespeare's contemporary Christopher Marlowe is notorious. Recklessly wayward, the dazzling author of plays both blasphemous and scandalous, he is also a member of Sir Walter Raleigh's secret society, the lover of the powerful Thomas Walsingham, and an occasional agent on the Queen's "most secret business." Marlowe knows too much.
For there are men - the Queen's Acting Secretary Robert Cecil and his spymaster among them - who want Marlowe silenced. With the aid of a forgotten manuscript, an unknown, unwitting actor, and a mysterious widow, some of Britain's most powerful will conspire to write Marlowe into a plot more complex, deadly, and artfully engineered than anything seen on the English stage....
With the pace and plot of a first-rate thriller, The Slicing Edge of Death is a brilliant evocation of an era, a startling portrait of a tormented man, and a chillingly plausible solution to a mystery that has puzzled historians for centuries. Published to coincide with the four hundredth anniversary of his death, the novel is a triumphant retelling of Christopher Marlowe's life and mysterious demise.