Macho, sexy, profoundly bloody and concerned with spiritual salvation. This wonderful adventure story is also an unavoidably resonant meditation on the power of religion to incite war. Sunday Telegraph May 1565: From the shores of the Golden Horn, Suleiman the Magnificent, Emperor of the Ottomans, has sent the greatest armada since antiquity to wipe out Islam’s most implacable foe, the Christian Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, in their stronghold on the island of Malta. Known to the Turks as ‘The Hounds of Hell’, the knights call themselves ‘The Religion’. Meanwhile, in Sicily, a disgraced and exiled Maltese noblewoman, Carla La Penautier, has been trying to return to the doomed island in an attempt to find the bastard son who was taken from her at his birth. Carla recruits a notorious adventurer and arms merchant – Mattias Tannhauser – to help her evade the Inquisition and to escape on the last galley to run the Turkish blockade. As the ensuing apocalyptic conflict between Islam and Christianity becomes the most brutal and harrowing siege in military history, Tannhauser and Carla must survive the bloody inferno and track down a twelve-year-old boy whose face they have never seen and whose name they do not know. And neither of them reckon on the return of the avenging Inquisitor, Ludovico Ludovici…