Stories about miraculous relics and the power of ancient artifacts are quite in vogue at the moment, and here is another one. I love a good adventure story with plenty of swashbuckling and derring-do set against the fascinating backdrop of the middle ages, and this is certainly a tale with all of these elements in it. The author is adept at description, and we see everything that Petroc sees, from an audience with the Pope to seedy inns, the wreckage of Byzantium and the relics themselves. There are plenty of fights, sinister villains and beautiful damsels, deaths and escapes to thrill, but there is rather too much of it all. After a while the plot flags and gets repetitive, causing the whole thing to rather lose momentum. Cutting out a few of the escapes from inns and suchlike would work wonders, for seeing the gaudy panoply of the 13th century through Petroc’s eyes is a worthwhile experience. I was especially impressed by the descriptions of sacked Byzantium; at times it almost seemed as though the author really had seen it for himself and this alone was almost worth the price of admission.