Into the Fire
1429: France has been ravaged by long-drawn-out war with England. Tomas Rustbeard is a double agent, his present task to discredit the Maid – France’s most revered woman – reveal her as a heretic and blasphemer, deserving death by burning. He becomes the Maid’s trusted companion but is increasingly puzzled. She is a leader, her courage beyond human. Even her warhorse, the fiendish Xenophon, adores her. In battle the Maid more than equals the King’s greatest knights. Inspirational but who, or what, can she be?
In Orleans in 2014, on the eve of a bitterly fought election which will seal the city’s future, Police Capitaine Ines Picaut and her team investigate fires of a ferocity that leaves no clues – until the autopsy of an incinerated human body reveals a thumb drive, a precious message swallowed by the victim, but so encoded that even Picaut’s most brilliant codebreaker will need time to decipher it. Meantime, why has the Church been ordering the burning of royal bones?
This marvellous book presents readers with an overflowing cornucopia of romance, horror, mounting anguish and two layers of baffling, disturbing mystery enlivened by a crowd of all-too-human people, ancient and modern. It is exceptionally well paced, and altogether a real treat.
