Once again in my life, all roads lead to Rome. I dropped a hint to it in my last post with the reference to the Leonine City. And thinking about the city brought me back to this post about HBO’s Rome and an article in The Verge titled “Before Game of Thrones, there was Rome.” Its point: without HBO’s Rome, we…
This past Saturday I started reading Breaker of Bones, the second novel in David Penny’s Thomas Berrington series. By Sunday, I had devoured the book. It was that good. Breaker of Bones is a gripping medieval mystery that, at times, places its hero in extreme peril at the hands of a truly diabolical villain. I…
I’ve been away from the blog for several weeks trying hard to finish the beta draft of the sequel to Enoch’s Device. In the meantime, however, I caught the premiere episode of Knightfall on History Channel, and wanted to share a few thoughts. I was completely unaware of this new series until I saw an…
Recently, I started reading more medieval mysteries, and I’m truly enjoying them. These are pure mystery tales like the stories of Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, except set during the Middle Ages. And this week’s mystery, The Red Hill by David Penny, is among the best I’ve read so far. Set in the fifteenth century,…
It look longer than I had hoped, but I finished reading The Flame Bearer, the latest installment in Bernard Conwell’s excellent Saxon Tales series about the founding of the kingdom of England in the early tenth century. Here’s my review. For ten novels – that’s right, ten – we’ve been waiting for Uhtred to reclaim…
After a brief vacation and a near month-long hiatus from the blog, I’m back today with a review of Liberty Boy by Irish author David Gaughran. It’s the first book I’ve read about Dublin that didn’t involve Vikings (who founded the city way back when), and one I highly recommend. Liberty Boy is a well-paced,…
I’ve been away from the blog for longer than normal because I’m spending most of my free time editing the sequel to Enoch’s Device. I always keep reading, however, and recently finished The Templar’s Cross: A Medieval Mystery by J. R. Tomlin. Here’s my review. The Templar’s Cross is an intriguing whodunit set in fifteenth…
All the while we were led to believe Black Sails was a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Turns out, that wasn’t exactly true. One of the more fascinating aspects of Black Sails is that the series wove together historical characters from the Pirates’ Republic of Nassau with the iconic, fictional characters of Stevenson’s…
With only two episodes left, Black Sails has finally taken us to Skeleton Island. And as anyone who has read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island knows, some serious stuff is about to go down. But what struck me most by the end of last week’s episode is that, except for his newfound partner, Flint is…
About a year ago, I wrote that Eleanor Guthrie was making “Cersei-like decisions” on Black Sails. Such is the nature of tragedies. I’m speaking in the classic sense of the term: a drama in which the character is brought to ruin by his or her tragic flaw. In Eleanor’s case, the flaw was a short-sightedness…
We knew it had to happen, the ultimate rift between Billy Bones and Long John Silver. And last Sunday it did. Last week’s episode of Black Sails was packed with drama. Woodes Rogers discovered, much to his displeasure, that Eleanor sold Nassau to Flint in exchange for the cache of gems, all that remains of the Urca…