It's launch day! #middlegrade #historicalfiction #musichistory FRANNI AND THE DUKE

Hello! I'm thrilled to share launch day with you. 

Franni and the Duke is here! This is a historical mystery novel about a 12-year-old girl in the court of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. It takes place in 1608, while famed composer Claudio Monteverdi is rehearsing his new opera, Arianna.

The missing duke of a neighboring town may be hiding out in Mantua as an opera singer. Franni thinks she knows the truth, but she dare not tell...

Buy Franni and the Duke on Amazon, Barnes&Noble, or directly from the publisher, Sunbury Press.

Cover reveal now! FRANNI AND THE DUKE middle grade historical novel from @SunburyPress

In May of 1608, the Duke of Mantua will throw the most spectacular wedding extravaganza in history. But it will all be ruined unless twelve-year-old Franni can keep a very big secret.

Franni and the Duke, coming soon from Sunbury Press, takes place during rehearsals for Arianna, an opera by the great composer Claudio Monteverdi. When Franni and her older sister Alli run away to Mantua, they both find work in Monteverdi's company. 

A messenger from the north announces that the next duke of the town of Bergamo is missing, and he may well be in Mantua. Alli notices that Luca, a singer she's in love with, fits the missing Duke's description. 

Although Franni thinks Luca is a pompous idiot, she promises for Alli's sake to keep Luca's secret safe and protect him from bounty hunters and Bergamo's rival family. She does this with the help of the company's set designer, a worldly wise and world-weary dwarf named Edgardo, who is not exactly what he seems. 

Here's a look at the beautiful cover of Franni and the Duke:

The intensive research behind J.S. Dunn's BENDING THE BOYNE

May I just say how much I love the term "archaeofiction," which I learned from this essay by J.S. Dunn? This author is all about research and historical fiction, two other things I love.

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Bending The Boyne, set in ancient Eire at 2200 BCE, emulates Jean Auel’s carefully researched series 21^st century archaeology and reveals a compelling story of change. Bending The Boyne is the first novel of Bronze Age Ireland to explore what might well have happened underlying the mythology. It can be read as archaeofiction, a tale of a largely forgotten culture.

in 'prehistory'. This work has no druid/esses, no time travel, no leprechauns; in short, no fantasy elements. What could possibly inspire a first-time author to spend ten years researching and writing such a work? The answer lies in western Europe’s oldest mythology and its largest concentration of prehistoric rock art. The Boyne mounds, older than the pyramids and Stonehenge, fell out of use around the end of the third millennium BCE as did megaliths along much of the north Atlantic coasts, from the Pyrenees in northern Spain, to Brittany, and into the Isles. The great passage mounds and their carved rocks are now acknowledged to be intricately engineered observatories for movements of sun, moon, and constellations. So what happened?

            To show the cultural clash between astronomy-loving natives and the metal-using newcomers proved no small task. Academics don't agree on all issues but gradually the pattern emerged, that the Beaker People of ca. 2200 BCE disrupted the native culture wherever they arrived. Fortunately, the author enjoyed reading numerous archaeology, archaeogenetics, and astonomy volumes and journals. RyanAir's cheap fares facilitated travel from Ireland, where the author had a country stone house, to the coasts of Wales, Orkney, Brittany, and Spain. 

            Boann’s impassioned struggle to hold on to her people’s astronomy and their values forms the central conflict, when marauders with long bronze knives seek to plunder the Boyne for gold. Boann is associated with the river Boyne and with the white river in the sky, the Milky Way. She appears briefly in the earliest myths and then she literally disappears. Her son Aengus is strongly associated with the passage mound now called Newgrange, his origin a prehistoric version of Who’s Your Daddy? The myths are not clear on just who is his father. It is clear that Boann is the mother of Aengus. In this novel, she is also an apprentice learning her people’s astronomy.

            She faces the choice of duty as against personal desires. Boann’s lover Cian, another sketchy figure from the earliest mythology, is banished overseas. From there he figures out how to help Boann and his people survive the incoming warriors in a profound way.

            The discord surrounding Aengus’ paternity haunts him into adulthood and leads to the shocking result when Aengus finally confronts Elcmar, the invader who married Boann for his own purposes.

            Aengus knows that “all of time is made up of night and day.” He intends to hold onto the Boyne forever, newcomers or not. Truth is stranger than fiction. Even today, winter solstice sunrise warms the inner chamber after more than 4,000 years. So it is that Aengus, the young son of Boann, returns at solstice to shine upon Eire. The Bru na Boinn complex in Ireland is now a UN World Heritage site that has tens of thousands of visitors annually. Perhaps the builders knew this structure could last forever.

            The hidden gold of Eire is not metal, it is the myths themselves and the rich heritage of Irish literature from the likes of Yeats, Synge, Joyce, Flann O’Brien, and others. The astute reader will catch echoes of these in Bending The Boyne.

            One last thing, about the precise location of gold in Ireland: that is still a secret.

More about Bending the Boyne:

Circa 2200 BCE: Changes rocking the Continent reach Eire with the dawning Bronze Age when marauders invade seeking copper and gold. The astronomer Boann and her lover the enigmatic Cian need all their wits and courage to save their people and their great Boyne mounds, as long bronze knives challenge the peaceful native starwatchers. Banished to far coasts, Cian discovers how to outwit the invaders at their own game. Tensions on Eire between new and old cultures and between Boann, Elcmar, and her son Aengus, ultimately explode. What emerges from the rubble of battle are the legends of Ireland’s beginnings in a totally new light.

This story appeals to fans of solid historical fiction, myth and fantasy, archaeo-astronomy, and Bronze Age Europe. Bending The Boyne received first place, historical fiction, 2011 Next Generation Awards.

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Follow the Bending the Boyne Facebook Page.

Purchase Bending the Boyne on Amazon.

Tom Williams and his Historical Secret Agent, James Burke

Today's guest, Tom Williams, tells us about the research and inspiration for his historical adventure, Burke in the Land of Silver. Ladies and gents, meet James Burke....

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Years ago, I wrote a 19^th century historical novel that attracted interest from publishers but was generally regarded as too "difficult" for a first novel. My agent (yes, I had an agent then) said that I should write a more straightforward historical adventure in the same period. It made sense, but I like writing stories that are strongly based in historical reality, so I had to find a real life figure I could base an exciting story on. A friend who knows how much I love Argentina suggested that I look at Europeans who were in South America in the early days of that country. Thanks to her, I discovered James Burke, a little known spy for the British around the time of the Napoleonic wars. Burke’s story had everything: war, espionage, beautiful women and an evil villain.

I've taken a few liberties in the telling of the tale but the plot of what became Burke in the Land of Silver is mostly either definitely true or very well could be. As I had already visited Argentina several times, I was writing about a place that I knew and I made a couple of extra trips to research places that were particularly connected with James Burke. That meant the opportunity to ride out with the gauchos on a cattle ranch and a trip on horseback up the Andes, besides the usual visits to museums and historical sites in Buenos Aires.

The story is set around the British invasion of Buenos Aires in 1806. It’s a little known – and not particularly impressive -- part of Britain's colonial history. The book gave me the chance to tell the story of a military adventure that few people will have heard of.

What I tried to do, having got this historical background accurate, was to write a modern spy story but set two hundred years ago. James Burke was to be my James Bond. I have always thought that Ian Fleming was a great writer and that his books are a model of how to write a thriller. Like Bond, Burke is nominally in the armed forces. Bond is a naval officer, Burke is in the infantry. Like Bond, he is a flawed hero: a snobbish womaniser, always with an eye to the main chance. (I’m not saying he has exactly the same flaws as Bond, but there's certainly an overlap.) In the end, though, we admire him because he is brave, loyal, and, when forced to choose, will ultimately do the right thing. It helps that he’s good looking, an excellent rider, multi-lingual and a crack shot.

Does it work? Well, I enjoyed writing it and, more importantly, I enjoyed reading it when I had to check the finished product before publication. I wouldn't claim that it's up to Fleming's standard, but I think it compares well with some of the stuff that’s been passed off as James Bond since Fleming died. I’m not really the person to say, though. Why not read it and decide for yourself?

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Learn more about Tom Williams on his blog.

Burke in the Land of Silver is available on Amazon as a paperback or on Kindle.

Kim Rendfeld Interprets Saxon History in THE ASHES OF HEAVEN'S PILLAR

One of the greatest challenges facing a historical novelist is choosing what information to use from a sea of research. But just as tricky is wanting to find out about a historical event or place and discovering that almost nothing is known about it for sure. Kim Rendfeld dealt with both of these situations as she wrote her latest novel.

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What Was the Real Pillar of Heaven?

By Kim Rendfeld

The title for The Ashes of Heaven’s Pillar is derived from the Irminsul, a pillar sacred to the Continental Saxon peoples, including my heroine, Leova. The one thing we know with certainty: Charlemagne ordered its destruction in 772 and took the gold and silver in its temple.

The nature and location of the Irminsul is uncertain—as is whether it was the only one. Some sources say it was a stone pillar, others say wooden pillar, and still others say it was a tree. It’s been described as having an idol of the war god atop it. Because of the presence of a carving, some have placed it at the Externsteine, north of the Saxon fortress Eresburg.

We can’t turn to the pagan Saxons for any clarity. They did not have a written language as we know it, and the Church did everything it could to obliterate a religion it considered devil worship.

So what’s a historical novelist to do with so many contradictions? Choose the most plausible version that best fits her story and confess her liberties in an author’s note. Or a blog post.

My first liberty is to call the Irminsul the Pillar of Heaven. Irminsul is often translated as “universal pillar.” I chose Pillar of Heaven in my novel because frankly it sounds better. And Wodan, the war god whose idol might have surmounted the pillar, was a sky god, so the Pillar of Heaven is not too much of a stretch.

Next was the location. Leova lives in a village just outside the fortress of Eresburg. Having it nearby allowed her to smell the smoke when it burned and see the charred blotch it left behind. It made the loss more real and more devastating.

Flames are a dramatic form of destruction, which is why I decided the pillar should be made of wood. To the Continental Saxons, the Irminsul’s destruction was the equivalent of burning a cathedral. Did the Saxons believe anyone who desecrated their sacred monument would face the gods’ wrath? Again, there is no text to verify it. But this was age that believed in divine favor and retribution, so that idea passes the plausibility test.

From a storyteller’s point of view, actual facts about the Irminsul are not as important as its impact on the characters. And in this case, Leova’s faith is shaken, as you will see in the excerpt below.

 

Excerpt

“I greet you in the name of Our Lord, Jesus the Christ,” he roared. “My name is Father Osbald. We come in peace and mean you no harm.”

By his accent, Leova knew the priest was a Saxon from Britain, like many of the other priests who had come to her village. They were mild men bearing treats for the children along with the teachings of their odd religion.

“But the God who destroyed the Irminsul will strike down anyone who harms us,” the priest said. “The sound of our horn will summon scores of Christian soldiers to our aid.”

From the corner of her eye, Leova saw Wulfgar and Ludgar shrinking back. Perhaps, the Christian God was stronger than the gods of the Saxons.

“We will give safe conduct to Eresburg to anyone who promises to accept baptism,” Osbald continued.

Wulfgar’s voice boomed. “How can you give safe conduct? You are not warriors.”

“We do not need swords and armor when we have the power of the one, true God. The Frankish soldiers know God will condemn their souls to eternal torture if they harm anyone in our care.”

Osbald spoke Saxon, but Leova could not understand half of what he was saying. From the confidence in his voice, Leova surmised the Christian God had given His priests magic power, enough to cow warriors into submission. How she needed safe conduct to the fortress—and Derwine!

“What is baptism?” Leova asked.

“You vow to follow Christ, forsaking your devils, and He cleanses you of your sins,” the priest replied.

“Do we have to shave our hair in that strange way?” Sunwynn asked.

“No, child.” Osbald chuckled. “The tonsure is an honor reserved only for men of the clergy.”

Baptism appealed to Leova. She suspected the conquerors would be more generous with those who shared their religion. Maybe it was fate to follow a stronger God. The Saxon gods had allowed the Irminsul to be destroyed, Leodwulf and Derwine to die, and Eresburg to be conquered by foreigners. Despite her sacrifices and prayers, the Saxon gods had betrayed her and her family!

“I and my children accept your offer,” Leova called to the Christian priest, “but we will attend to our dead first.”

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To read the first chapter or find out more about Kim Renfield, visit her website, her blog Outtakes of a Historical Novelist, or like her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter at @kimrendfeld.

You can purchase The Ashes of Heaven's Pillar at Amazon and Barnes & Noble and elsewhere.

Historical fiction from Christie Maurer: The world of medieval music

As some of you may know, I studied musicology in grad school and taught music history for many years. My specialty was medieval music. Imagine my delight to discover the books of Christie Maurer, whose series uses the world of the troubadour as its backdrop. Christie shares a bit of historical context with us today.

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Troubadours in Life and Literature

by Christie Maurer

The hero of my medieval fantasy series is Sir Loriano of Vayne (pun intended), a whimsical, irreverent young troubadour with a superb tenor voice. The theme is the struggle of a repressed feminine (the Dark Lady) against an entrenched patriarchy (a god of Light and Fire). A troubadour bridges between both worlds—a man who writes poetry to an unattainable high-placed lady, and Loriano is sworn to champion oppressed women.

I wanted The Whitewood Kitarra to show how troubadours related to one another, their work, and their patrons. We meet a group of them on the way to a tournament of verse. The sharp-tongued Gillom is Marcabru, known for his caustic wit. Overweight Rikkert is Gaucelm Faidit, who was very fat and made fine verses but couldn’t sing, so he hired a singer ... At a party, a trobairitz (Comtessa de Dia) sings of her lover’s infidelity. They quarrel, put each other down, steal one another’s verse, and all seek the beautiful countess’s patronage. 

The first known troubadour was Guillaume IX, Duke of Aquitaine (1071-1126), a Crusader and traveler who had two wives and took his neighbor’s wife for a long-term mistress. His poetry ranges from tender passion to outright raunchy.

Troubadours flourished—the 12^th and 13^th Centuries in Languedoc/Provence. The songs sound weird and plaintive to modern ears, but listen closely and study the text. You’ll discover passion, longing, subtle word plays, and laugh-aloud humor. For example, in Dona, tant vos ai preida by Raimbaut de Vaqueiras the poet courts a Genovese in elegant Languedoc and she tells him off in gutter Italian.

Bertran (Bernatz) of Ventadorn was the master. In The Dark Lady’s Stone Loriano’s poems are a paraphrase of his. My favorite Lancan vei la follhe winds its way through my later chapters. The son of palace servants, Bertran was banished from Ventadorn for making love to the countess. Henry II took Bertran into his house, and some of his poetry for Eleanor of Aquitaine (Guillaume’s granddaughter) was so passionate that scholars wonder if they had an affair. “I will kiss her on the mouth ... so that for a month the marks will be seen,” and “What is life worth if I don’t see in bed, under the window, my lady’s body, white as snow ...”

Jaufre Rudel de Blaye exemplifies amor de lonh, or distant love. He fell in love with the Countess of Tripoli for her reputation, and they exchanged letters and poems. He joined the Second Crusade to go meet her, but he fell ill on the ship and was dying when he reached port. She hurried to his side, and he died in her arms. When Loriano thinks of a lady he will never see again, I hear Lancan li journ en mai . . .

The brutal Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars (1209-1244) utterly destroyed tolerant culture of Languedoc. The troubadours fled to Italy and Spain and French laws, language, and lords replaced what had been, and the Inquisition broke religious resistance.

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To learn more about Christie Maurer and her series, visit her blog.

The Dark Lady’s Stone and The Whitewood Kitarra are available on Amazon and Smashwords. 

Pauline Montagna Expands the Meaning of "Write What You Know"

How can there be any imagination in fiction if we just write what we know? Today's guest, Pauline Montagna, has a very interesting perspective on this eternal question. She explains how that realization helped her write her historical novel, The Slave.

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Write What You Know

by Pauline Montagna

The usual advice to a new writer is ‘Write what you know’. It’s also generally expected that a writer’s first novel will be autobiographical. My first novel ‘The Slave’ is set in Medieval Italy, and although I have visited Italy several times, I have never lived there, and certainly not in the fourteenth century. Neither does my heroine’s story in any way reflect the trajectory of my own life. Yet, on reflection, both of these old saws apply.

Although I was born in Australia, all my grandparents and my mother were born in Italy and I grew up with a strong Italian identity. My mother was born in Basilicata, in a remote village on a hilltop far from the sea. My father’s people came from the island of Elba, off the coast of Tuscany. We lived with my maternal grandparents, and I grew up hearing stories from their village, speaking an obscure Italian dialect, watching my grandmother making pasta and special festive treats unique to her village, listening to my grandfather rehashing Italian politics from before he left Italy in 1938.

But being an Italian isn’t just about the food. It’s about family, community and culture. My place in the family defined my life. My friends were my extended family. My social life took place in our Italian community. My daily life – what I ate, how I dressed, who I mixed with, where I went to school, my interests – were all informed by my Italian culture albeit transposed to another country, and sometimes in the spirit of rebellion rather than compliance.

My Italian identity shaped who I am, and not only as a person, but as a woman. As an Italian girl, I was discouraged from being self-serving, emotionally demanding or sexually adventurous. But by example I also learnt that an Italian woman could be practical, strong, confident and intellectually independent.

As I reflect on what biographical elements went into creating my heroine, it was not the narrative of my individual life, but its context which created her family, her upbringing and their effects on her character.

My heroine’s early life is divided between the city state in which her father is a successful businessman and later a town councillor, and the village in which her parents were born and which they visit regularly. The culture of that village – its inter-relationships, religious festivals, food, dance, games and clothing – is derived from my mother’s village. The culture of the city derives from my father’s Tuscan heritage, though here I applied what I studied at university rather than what I learned at home.

With my Italian background, it should come as no surprise that I leaped at the opportunity to study Italian history at university, getting there early on enrolment day to ensure my place in the only two units of Italian history on offer, ‘Medieval Italian City States’ and ‘Florence and the Renaissance’. It was with great wonder and some pride that I learned that it was in Medieval Italy, in the city states of its northern provinces, that the modern world was born, that in fact the Renaissance didn’t materialise out of a few coincidences sometime in the fifteenth century, but grew out of the culture of independent, progressive, mercantile cities that began to emerge from the Dark Ages as early as the eleventh century.

This period, when Italy was ahead of the world and not the political and economic basket case I grew up knowing captured my imagination. So when I came to embark on my first novel, despite some trepidation, it was this period I would write about. Except for minor details, I didn’t need to do extensive research in dusty libraries as it was already all there at my fingertips. I just needed to get it down on paper. 

The Slave

Aurelia Rubbini, the only child of a rich merchant in fourteenth century Italy, has been raised to be a dutiful daughter, wife and mother, but she longs for something more than the restricted life intended for her. Then one day, her father brings home from a buying trip an Asian slave boy, Batu, who will reshape Aurelia’s destiny.

Aurelia and Batu are inexorably drawn to each other, but their relationship is forbidden as Aurelia is destined for an arranged marriage to further her father’s political ambitions. When Aurelia marries Lorenzo de Graziano, a nobleman with a dangerous reputation, Batu insists on going with her for her protection. But Batu’s presence arouses violent passions that Aurelia, in her innocence, can never understand.

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Learn more about Pauline Montagna on her website. Join her mailing list by May 31 to get your own free complimentary ebook copy of ‘The Slave.’

You can purchase The Slave on Amazon US, Amazon UK, and elsewhere.

Alan Calder: Architecture, Aristocracy, and THE GLORIOUS TWELFTH

Please welcome today's guest, Alan Calder, who writes contemporary novels with a historical background. He shares with us some fascinating backstory behind his most recent novel, The Glorious Twelfth.

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 Genesis

All my novels are contemporary, in the mystery/suspense genre with their roots planted very firmly in the history of kings, aristocrats and saints. 

My most recent novel, The Glorious Twelfth, was inspired by a building and an aristocratic family. The Sinclair mausoleum stands near an abandoned farmstead thirty miles south of John o’Groats, the northern sibling of Land’s End in Cornwall. The mausoleum housed the remains of the aristocratic Sinclairs for several hundred years before a larger facility was constructed. With an unusual ogive shaped roof, it is built over the remains of an ancient chapel to St Martin and surrounded by a graveyard which once contained a class II Pictish stone, conferring great antiquity and mystery on the site.   

                                                                                                                                             

The Sinclairs have been the preeminent family in Caithness for over seven hundred years, still holding the earldom.  They were the builders of Rosslyn Chapel in the first half of the fifteenth century, a unique church steeped in masonic and Templar mythology, so much so that in The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown speculates that the Holy Grail lies buried in the filled in crypt of the building. My take on history is that the then remote and inaccessible Caithness would have provided a much better hiding place for the Grail than Rosslyn.                                                                                                  The Glorious Twelfth opens on an archaeological dig led by archaeologist, Ben Harris, on the land of aristocrat, Sir Ranald Sinclair. Ben is soon distracted both by the laird’s beautiful daughter, Fran and artefacts that point to a medieval shipwreck near a cave that he discovers is connected by a tunnel to Sir Ranald’s mausoleum. 

My first novel The Stuart Agenda, gradually materialised from reading the history of the defunct royal Stuart dynasty, replaced by the Hanoverians who still occupy the British throne today. The final trigger for the novel was a report on a young man who turned up in Edinburgh claiming to be a direct legitimate descendant of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the romantic Scottish hero but loser at the battle of Culloden. He challenged the authorised version of history, ie that the Prince died without legitimate issue, providing an impressive family tree to back his claim. He was feted for a while until a suspicious genealogist found the falsehoods in the family tree and debunked him. It turned out that he was a fantasist Belgian waiter called Michel Lafosse. Despite the falsehood of his claim it did raise the ‘what if’ question in my mind. My fictional Stuart family is French and the novel opens with Robert, the eventual claimant, at Gordonston School, beginning to build his Scottish profile. It’s a political conspiracy hatched by his family who spot the opportunity that Scotland might be going independent and want its own monarch. The plot takes on more meaning since writing as the nationalists make strong ground, now forming the Scottish government and preparing a referendum on independence. It has something for everyone- conspiracy, politics, intrigue, espionage, royal romance and the locations in Scotland, England, France and Poland.

My third novel, A Pilgrimage Too Far, to be released soon, is based in France and draws on my own research into the life of a minor medieval French saint that I stumbled on while visiting a church in Normandy. Aspects of his life have a profound meaning in our own time and the book challenges some deeply held Catholic dogma.  

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You can learn more about Alan Calder on his blog.

You can purchase The Glorious Twelfth directly from MuseItUp Publishing or on Amazon and Amazon UK.

Philip Coleman on YA Historical Fiction and Medieval Belgium

Please welcome Philip Coleman, a debut novelist. His YA mystery, The Master's Book, was inspired by his own life in Ireland and Belgium, plus his interest in an obscure medieval artist.

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History and Mystery, all mixed up

I was inspired to take up writing in my late forties (not having written any fiction since my tender teens), when I read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Those of you who have read these wonderful books won’t be surprised to learn that my first attempts were fantasy, they were aimed at a young adult readership, and the lead characters were always feisty girls.

By then I realised that I needed to make my writing more personal. I had just moved back from Brussels, where I’d spent three very happy years watching my children blossom in the multicultural environment. So it was natural that I would try to recapture that rich experience through the eyes of a young teenager. In order to make it even more personal, I decided to write in the first person, for a change. Once having been an Irish boy myself it seemed easier to make the narrator an Irish boy, with an identifiably Irish name, Sean. However, I also wanted to convey the multicultural atmosphere of my children’s school, including the many beautiful mixed race classmates they encountered. The result was the lead girl, Stephanie, who is of Congolese-English parentage (and yes, she is feisty).

The other thing about Brussels is that, despite the modern offices of the EU area and elsewhere, it is a city that is full of history. Over time it was ruled by, among others, the Romans, the Holy Roman Empire, the Dukes of Burgundy, the Spanish Empire, the new republic of France and, finally, the Dutch monarchy, before becoming the capital of the independent country of Belgium, with its own king, in the 19^th century. I wanted to convey  some of this rich history, at least as a backdrop.

The final piece of the jigsaw came when I stumbled on an Internet article about the Master of Mary of Burgundy. We know very little about this artist – not even his real name – but we do know that he produced exquisite illuminated manuscript books, including for Mary, the last Duchess of Burgundy. It was her marriage to a Habsburg Prince, followed by her untimely death, that led to Spanish rule in what is now the Netherlands and Belgium.

The book touches briefly on other historical events: Belgian rule in the Congo (not an edifying episode in the country’s history), World Wars One and Two, and the Holocaust. But, above all, it is about two modern teenagers living in a modern city, confronting the problems that teenagers confront, especially when it comes to attractions of the opposite sex. What is out of the ordinary is that they get mixed up in an adventure that puts their lives in danger - twice. And, of course, the roots of that adventure lie in Belgium’s medieval past.

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You can learn more about Philip Coleman by following him on Facebook.

You can purchase The Master's Book as an ebook from MuseItUp Publishing or on Amazon.