Cover reveal: Blood of the Bear (Fire Born 5)
I am very excited to reveal the cover of my forthcoming Viking adventure novel, Blood of the Bear, the fifth novel in the Fire Born series. The book will be published by my excellent publisher Canelo in October, but I wanted to show you what the book will look like. I love the mad berserker eyes on this guy!
The tale this time takes place in Norway, Denmark and down south in Old Saxony (north Germany) and involves our two heroes Bjarki the Fire Born berserker and his half-sister Tor the Shield Maiden battling legions of Christian Franks and their all-powerful monarch Charlemagne (called Karolus in these novels). This is the back-of-book blurb to give you an idea of the story line . . .
Battle calls the berserker once again…
AD 781. Pagan Saxony groans under the Christian yoke. The invincible armies of Karolus, King of the Franks, occupy all this freedom-loving land and every Saxon must submit to baptism and pay tithes to the Church, or face death by beheading.
Duke Widukind, leader of the Saxon rebels, is sheltering in the pagan North, beyond Karolus’s reach. He hopes to persuade Bjarki Bloodhand – once a famous berserker, but now a father and family man – and his fierce sister the shield-maiden Tor, to join his revolt against tyranny.
But Bjarki eloped with Widukind’s sister Edith, who was betrothed to Abbio the Crow. In revenge, Abbio uses seithr to strike at Bjarki – a powerful magical spell to drive him insane. Can Bjarki resist the long slide into madness? And will Widukind finally liberate Saxony from the Franks?
Blood of the Bear (Fire Born 5) will be published in paperback and eBook on October 10 but you can pre-order it here (and I wish you would because it would be particularly helpful to me). There will also be an audio book in due course. (I have signed the contract for that but I don’t know when it is happening.)
If you don’t know the series at all, then you should start with The Last Berserker (Fire Born 1) followed by The Saxon Wolf (Fire Born 2) and so on. It looks likely that this one will be the last in the series. I have a number of other projects that I am involved (more Robin Hood books, a King Arthur episodic project and a new Mongol trilogy) with and, to be honest, I don’t have much spare time to continue with Bjarki and Tor. But never say never, when you read Blood of the Bear you will see that there is plenty of scope for more of these kinds of berserker stories in future, if there is sufficient public demand. Hope you enjoy it!
And the next Arthur???
Out at the end of next week or the week after. I’ve written abut half of Episode 4