King of the North giveaway – and the lucky winner is . . .
I found myself with a few spare copies of my fourth Viking novel – King of the North – so I thought I would give one away to one of my loyal UK readers (and UK only – sorry! – the postage is too expensive for overseas fans). If you don’t know the book, King of the North (cover below) is the tale of a great, but semi-legendary battle that took place in what is now Sweden in the mid-8th century AD. The competition was held over the recent Bank Holiday weekend, and now it is time to announce the lucky winner . . .
The competition asked you all to tell me who was your favourite minor character in one of my books and why you liked him or her. It had to be a minor character, so you could not choose either Robin Hood or Alan Dale from my Outlaw Chronicles series. Nor could you have Holcroft Blood or his rascally dad Colonel Thomas Blood, who tried to steal the Crown Jewels in 1671. Bjarki and Tor from the Fire Born books were also obviously banned. And, finally, you could not have either Arthur or Merlin from my episodic fantasy series The Broken Kingdom. All my other characters were up for grabs!
We had a lot of offers for favourite character: James Rees liked Brother Tuck, from the Outlaw Chronicles, but he also suggested (I think, tongue in cheek) the prostitute who took Alan’s virginity, who was called Kat, if I recall correctly. Ross McMillan names Valtyr Far-Traveller from the Fire Born series as his favourite character and Eric Riley suggested sweet-natured Goody, who was Alan Dale’s great love.
But the winner of the competition is . . . drum roll, please . . . JP Chance. Who chose Nur, Alan Dale’s doomed lover, whom I treated very badly in the Outlaw Chronicles books. He wins because I feel guilty about what I did to her. JP says of Nur: “I loved her . . . You broke me, man”. So many congratulations to our worthy winner! A signed, copy of King of the North will be on its way to you soon, my friend.
In other news
The next section of my Arthurian fantasy novel The Broken Kingdom – Episode Four: Arthur’s Folly – is now ready to download. And I will be publishing Episode Five: Arthur’s Battle the final section of the story in late June. The full novel will also come out as a paperback and, perhaps, audio book in the autumn.
If you don’t know anything about the Fire Born series (of which King of the North is book 4) start with The Last Berserker (Fire Born 1), available as a paperback or eBook from Amazon.