In the Garden of Iden

By Kage Baker.

I bought this off Amazon or Play or somewhere like that, after hearing a coupe of Baker's stort stories read on starshipsofa and enjoying them, and my first reaction was that this has to have been one of the most mis-marketed books I've ever seen. Perhaps that's got something to do with why neither the library nor any of the bookshops in town have any of Baker's further works?
The big arching meta-plot in Kage Baker's novels is that there's a 24th century company called Dr Zeus, Inc, which has developed time travel and immortal cyborgs which it has despatched to the past to acquire valuable objects and species which it can re-introduce to the future for profit. They're clearly the people responsible for coelacanths, and those weird trees that are discovered from time to time, thought extinct for millennia, surviving in just one isolated valley on the Himalayas, and would you believe it, their leaves might just contain the cure for narcolepsy!
So what did the marketing department of Hodder & Stoughton do with it? Historical Romance. Nothing at all on the cover to suggest that it's anything other than a bodice ripper, and just to reduce all possible doubt, the headline "A love story as new as tomorrow - as old as time". One rather presumes that no bookseller would have ever put it in the dingy corner of their shop where people who want stories about time travelling cyborgs would visit, and no customer who wanted a Tudor bodice ripper would have actually been happy with their purchase.
It was Baker's first book, and to be honest, it shows. She was involved in the theatre, working for at least a time as a Shakespearean language coach, and there's quite a bit of period detail I have no reason to think is not entirely accurate and a bit dull. The central cyborg, Mendoza, is posing as a minor Spanish noblewoman at the start of Mary Tudor's reign so that she can secure botanical samples from some soon to be no-longer extinct plants.
The Cyborg process involves acquiring small children from backwaters of history where they would be otherwise shortly dead and transforming them. This is Mendoza's first actual expedition since graduating from cyborg school, and she has a pretty dim view of mortals. But while taking her cuttings she falls for one of them, an earnest protestant watching Mary's religious reforms with trepidation. They bonk like bunnies, he gets very upset when he finds out what she really is, he gets burnt at the stake, she's upset for a while but gets over it. So I guess there was a Tudor romance in there, but the people who weren't expecting time travelling cyborgs would have given up by then.
There's a novella in there, sadly it's padded out to novel length.