Heavenly Intrigue Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the Murder Behind One of History's Greatest Scientific Discoveries

Heavenly Intrigueis the fascinating, true account of the seventeenth-century collaboration between Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe that revolutionized our understanding of the universeand ended in murder. One of history's greatest geniuses, Kepler laid the foundations of modern physics with his revolutionary laws of planetary motion. But his beautiful mind was beset by demons. Born into poverty and abuse, half-blinded by smallpox, he festered with rage, resentment, and a longing for worldly fame. Brahe, his mentor, was a flamboyant aristocrat who had spent forty years mapping the heavens with unprecedented accuracybut he refused to share his data with Kepler. With Brahe's untimely death in Prague in 1601, rumors flew across Europe that he had been murdered. But it took twentieth-century forensics to uncover the poison in his remains, and the detective work of Joshua and Anne-Lee Gilder to identify the prime suspectthe ambitious, envy-ridden Kepler himself. A fast-paced, true-life account that reads like a thriller,Heavenly Intrigueis a remarkable feat of historical re-creation.

Joshua Gilder has worked as a magazine editor, White House speechwriter, and State Department official and is the author, most recently, of the novel Ghost Image. Anne-Lee Gilder was formerly a producer and investigative reporter for German television. They live outside Washington, D.C.