CASTILE, 1449: Within the cities of Iberia, the bitter years that culminated in the massacre of Jews who would not convert to Catholicism produced a class of conversos who did convert but, as Fernando del Pulgar, a converso and chronicler of Queen Isabel wrote, ".they were not keeping either one law (Mosaic) or the other (Christian)." Between Testaments, Marrano, the first of a trilogy of novels depicting the lives of conversos and Jews in Christian Spain in the second half of the fifteenth century, revolves around the life of a young converso, Fernan Hernandes, whose ancestors converted to Catholicism during the massacres of 1391. Enmeshed in a struggle to establish social and religious parity with Old Christians, Fernan, cursed as a marrano (swine) by the townspeople, falls deeply in love with a young Jewish girl, ignoring a law that forbids marriage to a Jew, for which he could be burned at the stake. Based on events during a rebellion in Toledo led by Pero Sarmiento, a second-class noble, the novel intertwines historical fact and fiction into a suspenseful tale of love and peril in an era of religious oppression.