Main Titles

1266….Provence, France….

A sixteen-year-old boy rides desperately through the night – fearing for his life after the murder of his father, Comte Henri de Falgeur. A boy who will….

….become John of Arlès, a Templar knight – perhaps the last Templar knight….

….fight in the Holy Land against the Mamluks – and in France against corrupt nobles….

….endure a mysterious, personal vendetta for more than twenty years – one that causes him to lose all those he cares for….

….live a secret life, incognito, for three years, after killing the corrupt Templar Master of Marseilles….

….suffer a full year, bedridden, with both legs immobilised, in a hospital for the poor in Lyons – the result of a ‘rigged’ trial by combat joust….

….escape King Philip’s brutal and lethal purge of the Templars, by finding refuge in a remote part of Southern Spain…where the final ghost from his past obliges him to undertake one final mission: to carry the most sacred relic in Christendom – the True Fragment of the Holy Cross – or a simple lump of wood - John is never sure which – to its designated resting-place….A journey of more than 1500 miles – for a sixty-six year-old man who has lost everything – including his belief in God….with any number of adversaries – old and new – determined to stop him….

RELIC is a fast-paced, historically accurate, mystery/thriller, with many compelling, unexpected – often tragic – twists and turns. It covers a spectrum of the deepest of human bonds – love, family, friendship and faith – in ways that are heart-warming, heart-breaking and, ultimately, life affirming.

  A dysfunctional academic, a bisexual psychologist, a militant activist, a fashion-obsessed hitman, a shadowy presence in cyberspace…..and a mystery going back to King Arthur’s last battle at Camlann. The Clark’s Tale has more twists than a schizophrenic corkscrew. The vibrant narrative moves between Biblical Judea, Roman Britain and the present day – driven by a style of writing that is dramatically arresting and darkly comic.  Described as “a thinking person’s page-turner”, this is a world of smoke and mirrors, coincidences and contradictions, illusions and delusions. It weaves seductively through the arcane and the mystical – but is finally resolved by a truth that is shockingly and grimly mundane.  

(The Clark’s Tale is part of the author’s Canterbury series, featuring  DI Chaucer.)   .

  So, there you are – a middling, middle-class, middle-aged biographer – bored with your own life and – doubly worrying given your profession – the lives of others. Only suddenly – you are not there. You’re somewhere else – accidentally caught in a sinister spiral of intrigue that involves an English aristocrat, a Spanish art dealer, a retired detective, a dead crime-lord……and a dark and dangerous secret from the past. Except it’s no accident – for that secret involves you in a shocking way. And now your life is a lot less boring. The Crystal Garden is the story of an ordinary man caught in a maelstrom of extraordinary events; an unremarkable man who must now find remarkable qualities to survive. This noir, violent, pacey narrative is powerfully driven by writing that is taut, sharp and liberally seasoned with wholly unexpected twists and dark humour. If you wish to discover the truth – be seriously careful what you wish for…….    

  Imagine being Lord of the Universe, King of the Heavens, god of gods. You can see everything, do anything, go anywhere. You’re omniscient, immortal, worshipped by all. Cities, temples, oracles bear your sacred name. You are the Father-Protector invoked to cure all ills. Your powers are limitless. And……you’re bored. Cosmically bored. Why? That’s the one thing your omniscience doesn’t know. But it does know that this boredom – this stale, listless apathy – is becoming dangerous. Dangerous for yourself and dangerous for the entire universe. Something must change – by doing the one thing you’ve never done before and by going to the one place you’ve never been before. The Zeus Project is a mind-tickling trawl through mythology, theology, psychology, etymology, numerology, meteorology, ornithology and anger management. Apart from our eponymous hero, we also meet – among others – Hera, Aphrodite, Hades, Dionysus, Apollo (and Apollo 13), Herakles, Hesiod, Socrates, Alexander the Great, Jesus, Einstein, a young Steven Spielberg, two talking ravens and a sandfly. This book follows the ultimate quest, the greatest adventure – the search for the one thing we all seek. The Zeus Project will make you think. And laugh. A lot.    .

  It’s bad enough when somebody is trying to kill you. Even worse when you don’t know who or why.  Especially when you’re already dead…..   

Jamie Knight – a once-famous artist – finds his life – and death – enmeshed in deceit and disguise. And secrets. Dangerous secrets that only he knows. Secrets about a threat to global economies, about corrupt government ministers, about foreign criminal organisations……And then, there are the secrets he doesn’t know about.    

Wry, dry and electrically-charged, The Knight’s Tale is a quirky, twisty page-turner about a man forced – reluctantly – to confront the ultimate question: who am I?    (This book is part of the author’s Canterbury series – featuring DI Chaucer.)   .

  Germany, 1935…. 

In Breslau, near the Polish border, Bruno Hartmann celebrates the birth of his third child. He is 28, earns a good living driving large vehicles and is captain of the SC Breslau 08 football team. He is a decent, working-class socialist who adores his wife and ever-growing family. For Bruno, life is a blessing – and what you make of it….. 

In Holdau, a village in the very centre of the country, Armin Krüger is enrolled in a Nazi academy. He is 12 and the only son of a once aristocratic, now fervently Nazi family. The only things he loves are the roosting hawks at the family’s Rotwald estate. He is a solitary, secretive child with exceptional talents. For Armin, life is a beckoning – and, even by the age of 12, what you take from others….. 

Germany, 1938…. Bruno Hartmann is arrested by the Gestapo and Armin Krüger begins training as an officer in the SS….. 

Northern Europe, January 1945…. 

Bruno deserts his Wehrmacht post in Bergen, Norway and undertakes a desperate journey across war-torn Europe to rescue his family from the Red Army and the fall of Breslau – over 1,500 miles away, with no transport, during the most severe winter ever recorded. Only to spend the next three years of his life as a refugee in West Germany – not knowing if his wife, children and parents are still alive somewhere in East Germany. 

Armin begins planning his own personal war – for survival – after the imminent surrender. And will spend the next three years of his life taking increasingly drastic measures to conceal the war crimes of his SS past. 

Pluto Rising is the story of two very different individuals and two very different lives that eventually collide in a most unexpected manner. It is also two sides of the story of Germany and its people in the last century. Based on a true story, it moves constantly through light and shadow – love, faith, hope….hate, horror, evil. In a time and a place where ordinary people do extraordinary things – and extraordinary people do unimaginable things.    

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  Since an acclaimed first novel ten years ago, Paul Averill's life been increasingly reduced to a cycle of unsuccessful books, stalled projects and failed relationships. He is approaching middle-age in a state of morose, self-imposed isolation, when a visit to Rome, a meeting with the enigmatic Rita Dornbach and a strange proposal lead to a series of events that mysteriously - and irrevocably - transform Averill's life. These events centre upon an ancient Roman manuscript and take place at the Villa Antica - a remote, baroque seventeenth-century villa secluded in a vast expanse of park and woodland, up near the Italian lakes. The villa is occasionally visited by its owner – a woman only ever known as the Contessa – and the somewhat ethereal Raina, a woman of about thirty who seems to arrive and disappear without explanation. For the most part left alone – virtually incarcerated - at the villa, it is here that Paul Averill begins making remarkable discoveries - about the manuscript on which he works, about the past (his own, as well as Rome's), about love, about loss and - ultimately - about himself. Confronted constantly by the villa's archetypal images, mysterious episodes and a sense of compelling synchronicity, he begins to uncover "the secrets we keep even from ourselves". A final, disturbing, enthralling entanglement with the notion of the 'goddess' and the 'Eternal Female' brings Averill some enlightenment. But it is only with the unexpected twist of the postscript conclusion that he reaches a true inderstanding of all that has happened to him.  

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