Sharon Reviews: The Holy Lance

The Holy Lance (The English Templars Series, Book I) by Andrew Latham

Review by Sharon Bennett Connolly

Author Andrew Latham has so kindly offered a FREE KINDLE COPY of The Holy Lance to one lucky reader. Please see below for your chance to win!

Drawing July 31, 2015

This drawing has been held and a winner announced at Facebook.

Please see new reviews for more chances!

We have a giveaway with every review!

It’s 1191 and Richard the Lionheart is leading the Crusaders against Saladin’s Muslim army.

The Holy Lance is a fantastic piece of fiction. From the first page, you are drawn into the final battles of the Siege of Acre. English Templar Michael Fitz Alan leads his men to victory in a counter-attack against the Saracen army, saving the Crusaders from defeat. As part of the peace negotiations, Richard has demanded the return of the fragment of the True Cross, in Saracen hands since the Crusaders’ defeat at the Horns of Hattin. However, Richard decides against putting all his faith in the return of the True Cross, and sends Fitz Alan on a quest to retrieve the Holy Lance – the lance that pierced Christ’s side while he was on the Cross.

Fitz Alan and his hand-picked team of Knights Templars journey through hostile territory, battle Saracens and face down Assassins, to complete their quest, all the time guided by a Knights Hospitaller priest they just don’t quite trust….

Andrew Latham’s The Holy Lance is a wonderful story, filled with action, intrigue and adventure. Set during Richard the Lionheart’s Third Crusade, the action is fast and furious; the battle scenes are frantic and vivid. The novel is full of political intrigue and hidden agendas; Fitz Alan never knows quite who to trust, except his faithful Templars. The book works on many levels. The tension is palpable. The success of the mission is in no way guaranteed…..

Fast-paced and full of suspense, the story is absorbing, and draws you in. As if without trying, the author gives you a good grounding in the history of the Holy Land and in the differing objectives of the various combatants. There are some minor spelling errors – such as the use of ‘there’ when it should be ‘their’ – but they don’t detract from the story and after a while you don’t even to notice them. Every paragraph and chapter is filled to the brim with amazing detail, keeping the reader absorbed to the point that time just drifts away….

The book’s hero, Michael Fitz Alan, is a wonderfully complex character, with a past that is frequently alluded to, a man of the world who dedicated himself to the Fellow-soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, becoming one of their most effective captains. There are hints from the beginning of some sort of disagreement between Fitz Alan and Richard I – just enough teasing to get you curious. Fitz Alan is a model Templar Knight, trying to make amends for something; his desire to leave the material world behind and his past experiences clearly direct his current actions. Andrew Latham has made his character incredibly human, susceptible to doubts, fears and prejudices. He begins to learn that the Holy Land is not as black and white/good and bad as he thought before he arrived. A very likable character: you find yourself egging him on, wanting him to succeed.

All the lead characters of the Third Crusade have their parts to play. The portrayal of Saladin is surprising – and refreshing, looking at the Muslim leader from a whole new perspective. Richard the Lionheart is portrayed as the hard soldier you’d expect, with an intelligence which allows him to deal with the machinations of the incumbent Western leaders, Conrad of Montferrat and Guy de Lusignan. The relationships of all involved are deep and complex, but explored with such energy and passion, you almost feel you know them personally.

The novel provides a great depiction of the Third Crusade and of the motivations of the various combatants. The Templars and their rule are sympathetically and accurately depicted – the hard, trained knights and sergeants who fought for God and each other, while following monastic rules. You can almost feel the heat of the Levant’s sun and hear the sounds of battle. The battle scenes are marvelously choreographed; they are hectic and realistic.

As a debut novel, Holy Lance is incredible. It is one of those amazing books that grips you from the first page and won’t let you go until the last – and yet you never want it to end. Great as a stand-alone novel and yet, as the first in a series, it leaves you eager to read the next installment.

For your chance to win a FREE KINDLE COPY of The Holy Lance, simply comment below OR at this review's Facebook thread, located here. 

About the Author: 

Andrew Latham was born in England, raised in Canada and currently lives in the United States. He holds a PhD from York University in Toronto. Since 1997 Andrew has been a member of the Political Science Department at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he regularly teaches courses in Medieval Political Thought, International Security and Regional Conflict. His most recent publications include a non-fiction book entitled Theorizing Medieval Geopolitics: War and World Order in the Age of the Crusades published by Routledge in 2012, and The Holy Lance, his first novel, published by Knox Robinson on April 7 of this year.

You can follow and learn more about the author and his work at his blog and at Twitter. To purchase The Holy Lance you can go to the worldwide link at Amazon. 

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Sharon Bennett Connolly has a lifelong fascination with history, and has recently discovered a love of writing. She has combined these two in her blog, History…the interesting bits!

Sunday Wrap Up: Week ending June 15, 2014

Thank you for joining us once again for the Sunday Wrap Up, a feature whereby you the reader get to catch up with what's been going on in the week that was. This week, as is typical, we've got a giveaway, so be sure to follow the link to comment on the review and get your name in the hat!

Welcome to The Review's Author Interview

Joining me today is Andrew Latham. Welcome Andrew, and thank you for taking part in The Review's Author Interview.

An excerpt from Andrew Latham's Goodreads Page by way of an introduction:

Andrew Latham

K]nox Robinson author Andrew A. Latham is an award-winning professor of International Relations who regularly teaches courses in medieval political thought, international relations, and war. Trained as a political scientist, Latham has spent the last decade-and-a-half researching political violence in the Middle Ages. He has written scholarly articles on medieval war, the crusades, jihad, and the political thought of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquina[s.]...


Welcome Andrew, and thank you for taking part in The Review's Author Interview.

Your book Quest for the Holy Lance (English Templars #1) is your first historical novel, said to be published in 2015. What was your driving force that moved you to write this book?

Well to be honest, until about three years ago I never dreamed I'd write a work of historical fiction. I'd always loved reading historical military adventures, but it simply never occurred to me that I might write one someday. Scholarly books, yes - that's what scholars do. But a novel? I have to confess that the thought never even crossed my mind.

Theorizing Medieval Geopolitics

All that changed, though, as I was nearing completion of my recently published non-fiction book Theorizing Medieval Geopolitics. In preparation for writing that book, I'd been reading pretty widely about war and political violence in later medieval Europe and had just begun to get a handle on the crusades. Then one day I encountered the Templar knights. Like most people, I thought I knew what these guys were all about: either odious religious fanatics or cynical secular thugs using religion to camouflage their all-too-worldly motives. Like most people, though, I was wrong. Turns out, there was much more to these warrior-monks than I had initially thought or than is commonly supposed. The more I read, the more I became fascinated by these "new knights", the Templars in particular - not by the caricature of them that is so prevalent in contemporary popular culture, but by the historical reality of them.

A cerebral and fascinating interview that you will definitely wish to finish reading!

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Carol McGrath is the author of The Handfasted Wife and the soon-to-be-published The Swan Daughter. Here as a guest on Paula's People, she chooses her five favourite ill-fated marriages in fiction and shares her love of them.

As I researched life for women during the 11^th century whilst working on The Handfasted Wife, I reflected on the many works of literature that include ill-fated marriages and relationships. Edith Swan-Neck was set aside by King Harold II when he was crowned king in 1066. In the context of The Handfasted Wife, Edith retains her love for King Harold long after his death at the Battle of Hastings. Whether a marriage was a love-match or was arranged, ill-fated matches in literature often reflect the realities of life past and present. An old adage bears the truth that the course of love is rarely smooth. Here are a few of my favourite novels that contain ill-fated relationships.  

Dorethea Brooke and Edward Casaubon from Middlemarch by George Eliot        

Middlemarch is one of my favourite classics. Although it is not a romantic novel it is a passionate one. Dorothea Brooke, idealistic, young and beautiful, orphaned and intent on making something of her life weds the idealistic, stuffy clergyman Edward Casaubon. She wants to dedicate herself to the great man who spends his time writing a Key to All Mythologies. That they are ill fated is illustrated by their honeymoon in Italy when Dorothea expected to be overcome by emotion for all she sees in Rome and is tearful. Casaubon, on the other hand, has the sense that his new wife is not a protection against his sense of inadequacy but rather a perpetual threat and reproach. This novel endures for me because the central relationship is subtly recounted with humanity as are the other pairings that its pages contain, all filled with traps like a spider’s web.

Lara and Yuri from Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

I read this novel over and over for my finals in Russian Studies and I still love it. This epic story setting spans the early decades of 20th century Russia in turmoil. Its unfortunate marriages are those between Lara and Pasha and Yuri and Tonya. However, Lara and Yuri love each other passionately from their earliest encounters. They are separated by class, by their marriages, by war. As the couple finally come together in a country retreat in the Urals, personal and political events that frame this sweeping novel overtake them. Yet it is war-torn Russia that adds to the intensity of their love.The relationship is all the more poignant because their time together is brief.  It is a beautifully written novel and well translated twice, one that brilliantly incorporates a personal story with a thrilling political background. It has influenced my interest in how love survives through war-torn situations, a story with depth on many levels and I discover more emotional truths every time I re-read it.

Feel the rest of the love right here.

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Rain on Your Wedding Day

by Curtis Edmonds

When I picked this book up, I was expecting a formulaic romance novel, having not read anything about it beforehand except for a brief description. I was gladly mistaken; it is a unique story. It is described somewhere as a ‘modern Southern Gothic’ novel. It is modern, and wonderfully descriptive of the South, but is certainly not a Gothic novel. That is not to say that I don’t recommend it: I wholeheartedly do.

Rain on Your Wedding Day is a well-written and presented book. The story is constructed well and flowed. I was engaged from the start and did not want to put it down.

For me, the sign of a good book is if the reader stops ‘reading the words on the page’, and just gets drawn into the story, like an invisible observer. This definitely happened to me with this book. The writer is very descriptive when it comes to setting the scene, but I did find it harder to picture what the central characters looked like. 

The story is written in the first person, from the point of view of Will Morse.  This is interspersed with occasional conversations that he has in his head with his two daughters who have died.  These were particularly effective and emotive dialogues. One daughter, Trixie, veers between resentfulness, rage and love in her dialogue with Will, giving the reader an idea of just how hard it must have been to live with her when she was alive. 

This book shows an incredible insight into living with mental illness, from the depression and grief Will is plagued with, to managing the severe bipolar episodes that Trixie suffered from when alive.  I particularly liked the truthfulness about this book – that people don’t always magically get better; it can be a long, slow painful road with lots of relapses. For some, recovery may not even be possible. This was brave. 

For me, the novel also opened a thought-provoking debate about self-harm. Just how should a parent handle it?  Cosset and suffocate their child, or allow them freedom at the risk of tragic consequences? I thought the writer had a refreshing perspective on this issue.

As time goes on, the reader discovers more about the deaths of Will’s daughters.  The truth about Trixie’s in particular is heart wrenching, when it is revealed what part Will played in this.

This review also carries with it a giveaway. If you'd like to get your name in the hat, please comment at the review itself. There also is a link to its associated FB page readers may comment at. 

For last week's Wrap Up, please click this link.

Louise E. Rule Interviews Andrew Latham for The Review's Author Interview

Welcome to The Review's Author Interview

Joining me today is Andrew Latham. Welcome Andrew, and thank you for taking part in The Review's Author Interview.

An excerpt from Andrew Latham's Goodreads Page by way of an introduction:

Andrew Latham

[K]nox Robinson author Andrew A. Latham is an award-winning professor of International Relations who regularly teaches courses in medieval political thought, international relations, and war. Trained as a political scientist, Latham has spent the last decade-and-a-half researching political violence in the Middle Ages. He has written scholarly articles on medieval war, the crusades, jihad, and the political thought of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquina[s.]...




Welcome Andrew, and thank you for taking part in The Review's Author Interview.

Your book Quest for the Holy Lance (English Templars #1) is your first historical novel, said to be published in 2015. What was your driving force that moved you to write this book?

Well to be honest, until about three years ago I never dreamed I'd write a work of historical fiction. I'd always loved reading historical military adventures, but it simply never occurred to me that I might write one someday. Scholarly books, yes - that's what scholars do. But a novel? I have to confess that the thought never even crossed my mind.

Theorizing Medieval Geopolitics

All that changed, though, as I was nearing completion of my recently published non-fiction book Theorizing Medieval Geopolitics. In preparation for writing that book, I'd been reading pretty widely about war and political violence in later medieval Europe and had just begun to get a handle on the crusades. Then one day I encountered the Templar knights. Like most people, I thought I knew what these guys were all about: either odious religious fanatics or cynical secular thugs using religion to camouflage their all-too-worldly motives. Like most people, though, I was wrong. Turns out, there was much more to these warrior-monks than I had initially thought or than is commonly supposed. The more I read, the more I became fascinated by these "new knights", the Templars in particular - not by the caricature of them that is so prevalent in contemporary popular culture, but by the historical reality of them.

Being a scholar by both training and inclination, my first thought was to make sense of this weird phenomenon by writing a non-fiction book on the topic. The more I thought about what I wanted to achieve, however, the more it seemed that non-fiction would not be the best tool. I was interested in the Templars, not because of their supposed secrets or mysteries, or their fabulous wealth and influence, or even their marital exploits, but because of what they were: warrior-monks. Think about it for a moment. On the one hand, Templars, like all medieval knights, were warriors, bred to be brutal and merciless killers. On the other, they were pious monks, committed to a life of prayer and works of charity. How was that possible? How did they reconcile these two personas? How, as it were, did they manage to sustain the hyphen between the words "warrior" and "monk"? Answering these questions, it seemed to me, required reconstructing the imaginative world of these self-styled "knights of Christ". And the best medium for that sort of project, it seemed to me, has always been fiction.

That being said, however, The Holy Lance is not simply an academic work dressed up as fiction. I grew up reading the classics in historical military adventure: series like C.S. Forester's Hornblower, Alexander Kent's Bolitho, and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin. And in more recent years I have enjoyed the novels of Ben Kane, Conn Iggulden, Si Turney, Robyn Young, Jack Hight and, of course, Bernard Cornwell. These novels taught me what good military historical fiction looks like. My goal in writing The Holy Lance was to apply everything I learned from these great writers to provide an insightful yet entertaining account of the Templars and the Third Crusade.

Can you tell the readers about your character, Michael Fitz Alan; for example, what are his strengths and weaknesses?

Fitz Alan has been groomed from birth to be a warrior and leader of warriors; he has great skill-at-arms and is an accomplished and extraordinarily proficient killer, he is courageous, resourceful and tough. When pushed, he is capable of extraordinary savagery and ruthlessness. He lives to fight and is constitutionally incapable of turning his back on the warrior life. Fitz Alan is also, however, wracked by a profound sense of sinfulness. Caught up in the intense lay piety of his era, he increasingly sees the warrior life he has been leading as morally corrupt, spiritually empty and sure to earn him eternal damnation. Seeking to reconcile these two deeply contradictory elements of his personality, he considers "taking the cross" (i.e. going on crusade), but ultimately joins the order of the knights Templar instead. His reasoning is that as a Templar he will be able to continue fighting, but will do so for both a higher purpose and his own personal salvation.

Initially, while in England, Fitz Alan focuses on the spiritual disciplines, learning the new life of the Christian monk. After leaving England, however, the realities of war progressively transform him into a perfect synthesis of the warrior and monk: a brutal and capable fighter motivated by a proper inward disposition, faithfully fighting on behalf of what he considers to be the only truly just cause in this life (defending Christ and His Church). In other words, he is transformed from a brutal secular knight, into a quintessential exemplar of St. Bernard's "new knighthood" - a perfect knight and perfect monk, fighting a "double combat of flesh and spirit". He believes his redemption in both this life and the next depends on both killing the enemies of the Church and living an ascetic and pious religious life that sustains his proper spiritual disposition (humility before God and obedience to His Church).

Fundamentally, then, Fitz Alan is an archetypal warrior hero: courageous, clever, resourceful, idealistic, tough and, of course, a peerless fighter. Like all such heroes, however, Fitz Alan is also "wounded". Externally, this takes the form of a recurring pain in his shoulder (a rotator cuff injury, which I have to assume was common among people who spent so much time swinging a heavy sword). Internally, it takes the form of a longing for spiritual redemption that can only be fulfilled by living the Templar ideal as fully as possible. It is the effort to realize this ideal - to strike the perfect balance between the warrior and the monk - that both animates Fitz Alan and makes him interesting.

None of this is to imply that Fitz Alan's a saint - like all great military adventure heroes, he most assuredly isn't. It is, however, to place him in his proper historical context. Fitz Alan isn't simply a twenty-first century (presumably secular-humanist hero) parachuted into a story set in the twelfth century. Rather, he's my very best educated guess about what a twelfth century hero would actually look like. As such, like almost all people in medieval Christendom, Fitz Alan understands the world in terms of Christian religious categories and concepts. For the people of Medieval Latin Christendom, these beliefs were neither a symptom of mental illness nor a cynical ideological smokescreen concealing their true motives (power, wealth, glory, pleasure, what have you). Instead, rather like the laws of physics are for us, Christian religious categories and concepts provided the fundamental imaginative matrix through which medieval people made sense of - and thus acted in - the world around them. As I see it, not taking the medieval religious worldview seriously would simply be to get Fitz Alan - and his world - entirely wrong.

What or who was your inspiration for this character, or is he straight from your imagination?

I suppose Fitz Alan is partly inspired by all those great warrior heroes of both classical mythology and contemporary historical fiction - heroes like C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower, Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe and Thomas of Hookton, Si Turney's Marcus Falerius Fronto, and Simon Scarrow's Cato and Macro. But - and this is where his DNA differs from those great characters - he's also very much inspired by Bernard of Clairveaux's ideal of the "new knight". Whereas most heroes in military historical fiction are either irreligious or adherents to some form of pre-Christian religion, the Fitz Alan character was fundamentally inspired by my desire to figure out what made Saint Bernard's so-called knights of Christ really "tick". In a sense, then, what I have done with Fitz Alan is to take Saint Bernard's highly stylized vision of what a Christian holy warrior should look like and bring that vision to life by exploring the interior life - the motivations, struggles and inner conflicts - of those who belonged to a military religious order like the Templars.

Some authors have a special place and time of day when they like to write. Do you have a special place, and a particular time of day for writing?

The rhythms of my fiction-writing life are governed to a large degree by the rhythms of my scholarly life (not to mention those of my life as father of two young children). Given my responsibilities as a teacher, scholar and citizen of the college (a euphemism for "a member of far too many college committees") I'm generally free to write fiction only during January and then again over the summer break. This makes for a fairly compressed writing "season", but I can't really complain. During the months when I'm free to write I really am free to write - full time and without much in the way of distraction or diversion. As to the particular times of day that I like to write, it works out that I typically write in shifts. The first is in the morning when I spend three or four hours drafting bits and pieces of the book. I'm not terribly linear about this so the passage that I happen to be working on any given morning might be the next bit of the chapter I'm currently drafting or it could be a passage that I think I might need several chapters down the line. The second shift starts a couple of hours before retiring for the evening (i.e. after the kids have gone to bed). During this time I generally work on revisions or perhaps do a little research to get me started in the morning. I never really sat down and planned my writing schedule this way - the routine just sort of evolved organically over many years of writing scholarly non-fiction works and I carried it over into my fiction-writing career. Might not work for anyone else, but it seems to work for me.

As to where I write, well, that all depends. I typically write at home - and when I do, I do so in my (not very special, but quite utilitarian) office during the morning shift and at the kitchen table in the evenings. When necessary, however, I can also write elsewhere. For example, while visiting my parents in Toronto I wrote in my Dad's office, and while staying with my in-laws in Winnipeg, I wrote every night at their kitchen table. Basically, when I'm away from home, I write wherever I can open my notebook with a modicum of peace and quiet (or a minimum of distractions, whichever bar is lower). Can't say I'm always all that productive in these alternative settings, but I always manage to get something written.

There are some places, however, that I can't write (or at least have had neither the occasion or desire to do so). For example, I can say, honestly and without qualification, that I have never written so much as a word of fiction in a coffee shop or pub, on a beach, at a writers' retreat, on an airplane or train, in my backyard or (perish the thought) at my office at the college. I know other authors write in such places, and do so with great results. For me, though, it's just inconceivable.

Finally, Andrew, do you have any plans to write a sequel to Quest of the Holy Lance?

Yes indeed. This past January I was able to sketch out a pretty detailed outline for the next instalment of what is currently conceived as a trilogy but which may evolve into a longer series. And, as it is now officially summer break, I have begun drafting. The goal is to complete the as yet untitled sequel to The Holy Lance before September and write the third and final instalment in January/summer of 2015. Whatever happens, I promise Michael Fitz Alan will definitely see the Third Crusade through to its bitter end.

After that, and providing the punters approve, I'll continue writing historical fiction. I may keep on with the English Templars - I already have many, many more stories half-developed for this "band of brothers" ready to go - but I may also branch out a bit. The Hundred Years War appeals a very great deal, as does the First World War (I've written or taught about both in recent years). We'll just have to wait and see.

Andrew, this has been a most thoroughly interesting and enjoyable interview, and I would like to thank you for taking part in The Review's Author Interview. We will look forward to reading Quest for the Holy Lance (English Templars #1).

You can find Andrew Latham on Goodreads and on Facebook 
Andrew's website can be found here.

Louise E. Rule is author of Future Confronted

Louise can also be found on Facebook here.