F
   
  alcons of Fire and Ice

Karen Maitland

Karen Maitland has an honours degree in Human Communication and doctorate in Psycholinguistics. Her first novel, The White Room, was short listed for The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. She also has written and co-written seventeen commissioned non-fiction books. She is a member of the Women Writers Network and the Historical Novel Society.

She has travelled extensively from the Arctic Circle to Albania, and has worked in Nigeria, Northern Ireland and Israel. Her work in Nigeria during a bloody civil war and in Northern Ireland during ‘the troubles’ has deepened a life-long interest in cross-cultural issues and she has worked as a writer and editor on a number of cross-cultural books including Poems of Cultural Diversity and Cinders in the Wind.

In 2002 she was commissioned by the National Rural Touring Forum to travel for three months in the middle of winter with a multicultural show playing in twenty-one isolated and rural locations from Cumbria to Devon, to write a book about the performers, audiences, people and places. It was this tour that first sparked the idea for her medieval thriller, Company of Liars, as she began to appreciate what life must have been like for those people who had to earn their living on the road.

Her love of all things medieval grew from frequent ‘escape’ visits across the North Sea to Belgium, following in the footsteps of her hero Stephen Fry, and she now lives in the splendid medieval city of Lincoln.

 

 


/www.karenmaitland.com

 

Titles: Company of Liars, The Owl Killers, The Gallows Curse, to come: Falcons of Fire and Ice (2012), The Vanishing Witch, The Raven's Head ( Michael Joseph/Bantam Dell USA)

     
 

The Gallows Curse

1210 and a black force is sweeping England.

For a vengeful King John has seized control of the Church, leaving corpses to lie in unconsecrated ground, babies unbaptized in their cradles and the people terrified of dying in sin.

And in the village of Gastmere, the consequences grow darker still when Elena, a servant girl, is dragged into a conspiracy to absolve the sins of the lord of the manor. As the terrors that soon begin to plague Elena's sleep grow darker, in desperation she visits the cunning woman, who has been waiting for just such an opportunity to fulfil an ancient curse conjured at the gallows.

Elena, haunted by this curse and threatened with death for a crime she didn't commit, flees the village ... only to find her nightmare has barely begun.

For treachery lurks in every shadow as King John’s brutal reign makes enemies of brothers, murderers of virgins and sinners of us all.

 

 

 

 


 

     

Without Hilary I would never have been taken on by an agent or had my novels published. I am deeply indebted to her for her time, her advice and her unfailing encouragement.

                                                                                                                        Karen Maitland

 

     
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