Last week I reviewed Rome The Eagle of the Twelfth by M.C. Scott, it was rather fantastic. Afterward  I was pleasantly surprised when Bantam Press got in touch and offered an excerpt from the novel that I could share with readers of the site. As an added bonus, there is also some additional insight direct from the author herself. Please enjoy!    **** The heights were hemmed about by winter trees, blowing ragged in the coming breeze, shading the grey hillside with copper. The scent was of dying fires, and oiled leather, and iron; the scent of any army in the morning; the scent of awaited death; a scent so peaceful, I could have lain down with that as my shroud, and slept. And that was when the sun scraped through a finger’s width of mist and Helios cast a single ray, spear-straight at our Eagle, washing it with living light, the breath of the gods. Horgias took hold of the haft and raised it up so that it flew above us, our guardian and our care, ours to protect until death. We cheered, how could we not? And so revealed how very few we were. There was a moment’s…

They are known as the Legion of The Damned… Throughout the Roman Army, the XIIth Legion is notorious for its ill fortune. It faces the harshest of postings, the toughest of campaigns, the most vicious of opponents. For one young man, Demalion of Macedon, joining will be a baptism of fire. And yet, amid the violence and savagery of his life as a legionary, he realises he has discovered a vocation – as a soldier and a leader of men. He has come to love the XIIth and all the bloody-minded, dark-hearted soldiers he calls his brothers. But just when he has found a place in the world, all that he cares about is ripped from him. During the brutal Judaean campaign, the Hebrew army inflict a catastrophic defeat upon the legion – not only decimating their ranks, but taking away their soul, the eagle. There is one final chance to save the legion’s honour – to steal back the eagle. To do that, Demalion and his legionaries must go undercover into Jerusalem, into the very heart of their enemy – where discovery will mean the worst of deaths – if they are to recover their pride. And that, in…

London, 1850. Fog in the air and filth in the streets, from the rat-infested graveyard of Tom-All-Alone’s to the elegant chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where the formidable lawyer Edward Tulkinghorn has powerful clients to protect, and a deadly secret to hide. Only that secret is now under threat from a shadowy and unseen adversary – an adversary who must be tracked down at all costs, before it’s too late. Who better for such a task than young Charles Maddox? Unfairly dismissed from the police force, Charles is struggling to establish himself as a private detective. Only business is slow and his one case a dead end, so when Tulkinghorn offers a handsome price for an apparently simple job Charles is unable to resist. But as he soon discovers, nothing here is what it seems. An assignment that starts with anonymous letters leads soon to a brutal murder, as the investigation lures Charles ever deeper into the terrible darkness Tulkinghorn will stop at nothing to conceal.  Inspired by Charles Dickens’ masterpiece Bleak House, Tom-All-Alone’s is a new and gripping Victorian murder mystery which immerses the reader in a grim London underworld that Dickens could only hint at – a world…

Imagine there was a supernatural chiller that Hammer Films never made. A grand epic produced at the studio’s peak, which played like a cross between the Dracula and Frankenstein films and Dr Terror’s House of Horrors… Four passengers meet on a train journey through Eastern Europe during the First World War, and face a mystery that must be solved if they are to survive. As the Arkangel races through war-torn country side, they must find out: What is in the casket that everyone is so afraid of? What is the tragic secret of the veiled Red Countess who travels with them? Why is their fellow passenger the army brigadier so feared by his own men? And what exactly is the devilish secret of the Arkangel itself? Back in 1989 I was an impressionable fifteen year old and I had just started to develop a passion for reading and a never-ending love for cinema. One of the first books I read, through what I thought at the time were adult eyes, was Roofworld by Christopher Fowler. Meanwhile my introduction to horror cinema, via a wonderful horror obsessed grandmother, was the works of Hammer. Little did I realise some twenty-three years later…

1494 Barcelona As Torquemada lights the fires of religious fervor throughout the cities of Spain, accused heretics are not the only victims. Thousands of books and manuscripts are lost as the Black Friars attempt to purge Europe of the ancient secrets of the gods and the bold new ideas that are ushering the Renaissance.  Nadira lives a dreary life as servant to a wealthy spice merchant until a dying scholar is brought to the merchant’s stable, beaten by mercenaries who are on the hunt for The Hermetica of Elysium. To Nadira, words are her life: she lives them as her masters scrivener and dreams them in her mother’s poetry. She is pursued as passionately as the fabled manuscript for her rare skill as a reader of Ancient Greek, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew that maker her valuable to men who pursue the book to exploit its magic. Kidnapped by Baron Montrose, an adventurous nobleman, she is forced to read from the Hermetica. It is soon revealed to her that ideas and words are more powerful that steel or fire for within its pages are the words that incite the Dominicans to religious fervor, give the Templars their power and reveal the…

LET BATTLE COMMENCE… Thanks to his father’s gambling debts, young Jack Keats finds himself on the streets trying to graft enough coin to keep him and his two younger brothers fed. When a daring bank robbery goes awry, Jack narrowly escapes the scaffold on to be pressed into the Royal Aerostatical Navy. Assigned to the most useless airship in the fleet, serving under a captain who’s is most probably mad, Jack seems to be bound for almost certain death in the far-away deserts of Cassarabia.  Meanwhile on the other side of the world, Omar ibn Barir, the slave of a rich merchant lord, is unexpectedly freed and enters into the service of the Caliph’s military forces – just as war is brewing. Two very similar young men prepare to face each other across senseless field of war. But is Omar the enemy, or is Jack’s true nemesis the sickness at the heart of the Caliph’s court? If Jack and his shipmates can discover what Cassarabia’s aggressive new regime is trying to conceal, he might survive the most horrific of wars and clear his family’s name. If not… I have to admit that prior to picking up Jack Cloudie I hadn’t…

Occasionally I manage to convince Mrs Cheesecake to write a review for me. This is her latest review. I’d just like to take a moment to thank her for her work. The enduring love story of Anthony and Cleopatra has been retold many times throughout history. In Queen of Kings, Headley has given this famous tale a darker and more mythological twist. We join the lovers at the point in history when Octavian Caesar, great nephew of the late Julius, is camped outside the city of Alexandria. Octavian sends a false message to Cleopatra’s beloved Anthony and he kills himself believing his queen has betrayed him. On discovering the deceit, Cleopatra is driven to making an impossible deal, and uses dark magic to summon one of the old gods, the goddess Sekhmet, and strikes a bargain – her soul for her husband’s life. Sadly, through an unfortunate accident, the resurrected Anthony dies again.  One could say, to lose your husband once is unfortunate; to lose him again is careless. As is often the case when humans make deals with deities, the consequences of the bargain are never fully realised until it is too late. The last pharaoh of Egypt becomes…

1062, a time many fear is the End of Days. With the English King Edward heirless and ailing, across the grey seas in Normandy the brutal William the Bastard waits for the moment when he can drown England in a tide of blood. The ravens of war are gathering. But as the king’s closest advisors scheme and squabble amongst themselves, hopes of resisting the naked ambition of the Norman duke come to rest with just one man: Hereward… To some a ruthless warrior and master tactician, to others a devil in human form, Hereward is as adept in the art of slaughter as the foes that gather to claim England’s throne. But in his country’s hour of greatest need, his enemies at Court have made him outlaw. To stay alive – and a freeman – he must carve a bloody swathe from the frozen hills of Northumbria to Flanders’ fields and the fenlands of East Anglia. The tale of a man whose deeds will become the stuff of legend, this is also the story of two mismatched allies: Hereward the man of war, and Alric, a man of peace, a monk. One will risk everything to save the land he…