A psychic historian finds secret codes woven into an altar cloth and learns how to use the Temple Gates.
But on a skiing holiday, his crippled wife is kidnapped by the witch Georgina, now allied with a murderous sect, and taken back to medieval France in this taught, dark thriller.
He gambles with his life, chases the assassins and wakes up in an oubliette; a dungeon with no way out!
It's pitch black, he doesn't know his jailer or remember his name.
Could his captors be his arch-enemies; the Biblical shapeshifting Serpents?
The dice are loaded.
Where is he? Who put him here? How can he get out?
Can you face the fear... of total... darkness?
Shapeshifting, time travel and military conflict all come together in this richly plotted paranormal thriller.
If you love the Da Vinci Code, you will adore The Devil's Own Dice.
Also available as an eBook in DRM-Free formats (epub, SonyReader - LRF, Kindle .mobi, Palm Doc PDB, PDF, RTF and Plain Text) at smashwords.com/books/view/214167
From the author: My own family's roots, uncovered over ten years, had led me to one Guillaume; a Chevalier (Knight) in 13th Century Languedoc, France; my earliest ancestor. Simultaneously, I had pursued a theological interest in the Cathars, first through reading a number of books about the Knights Templar and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci code and later, an interest in Monsegur and the Rennes-le-Chateau, near where the lost treasure of the Cathars is said to be hidden.
My interest in the paranormal became focused around reincarnation and lycanthropy (werewolves and vampires). I have always loved old Hammer Horror films and particularly the work of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. I have also always been interested in luck, and the constant battle between good and evil, light and dark, and yin and yang; who isn't? My own luck seems to run in phases of waves; periods of good luck followed by periods of very bad luck. I decided that my main character, as well as being physically imperfect, must have some kind of rare interaction with luck and the forces of good and evil.
From there, I developed the idea that luck might have something to do with the effect of the battle between good and evil: that in fact both Satan and God might both have one hand on the tiller of luck.
I knew the main character would be flawed physically and yet have strange psychic powers but only when I wrote a scene in a graveyard, Highgate Cemetery, did I know that he would also become a Secret Agent and later an amateur sleuth.
Yet another theme is Witchcraft. I have long been interested in the influence of Gurdjieff and Mdm. Blavatsky on modern western ideas. I also make frequent references to the Malleus Maleficarum - the witch-hunter's bible - and wicca, particularly Gardnerian wicca. You will also find references to some cult films such Eye of the Devil.
The final theme I wanted to get into my novel was the gothic. The themes of murder, werewolves, vampires, blood, eroticism, sex and the paranormal are all things that I like in a novel. My influences are Kate Bush, The Mission, Lord Byron, John Keats (The Eve of St. Agnes is a particularly favourite poem of mine) and, to some extent, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Sex and death are the themes that everyone seems attracted to. As a consequence, I couldn't resist a climax to my novel that took place in one of the world's greatest Gothic masterpiece...
Educated near Oxford, during English author Lazlo Ferran’s extraordinary life, he has been an aeronautical engineering student, dispatch rider, graphic designer, full-time busker, guitarist and singer, recording two albums. Having grown up in rural Buckinghamshire Lazlo says:
“The beautiful Chiltern Hills offered the ideal playground for a child’s mind, in contrast to the ultra-strict education system of Bucks.”
Brought up as a Buddhist, he has travelled widely, surviving a student uprising in Athens and living for a while in Cairo, just after Sadat’s assassination. Later, he spent some time in Central Asia and was only a few blocks away from gunfire during an attempt to storm the government buildings of Bishkek in 2006. He has a keen interest in theologies and philosophies of the Far East, Middle East, Asia and Eastern Europe.
After a long and successful career within the science industry, Lazlo Ferran left to concentrate on writing, to continue exploring the landscapes of truth. - - - From lessons learned as a professional musician about personal privacy, I do not publish using my real name but with the pen name Lazlo Ferran. Above, you can read a brief profile that you will find anywhere on the internet, and below, you will find my interview, qualifications and industry endorsements.
Interview
I was interviewed by The Authors Show about my novel Ordo Lupus and the Temple Gate. In the interview video on my profile to the left, I share:
1 How Ordo Lupus and the Temple Gate blends myth and mystery 2 Lazlo’s research into secret societies and historical settings 3 Behind-the-scenes writing insights
Qualifications
1. After a year studying a degree in Aeronautical Engineering, I chose to leave and received a BTEC Diploma in Graphics at Salisbury College of Art in 1985. 2. My IT Qualifications: building an early CMS from scratch in Perl, certificates in Search Engine Building, JSP, ColdFusion, SQL, B2B sofware. 3. In 2017 I became certified (with Distinction) from the TEFL Academy, London as a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language and gained experience teaching foreign students in a local professional school, although I had already taught children with varying degrees of dyslexia to read before. You can see my certificate at lazloferran.com/about 4. As for my knowledge of history, I have been a keen genealogist since the 90s and have traced my family back to a 13th Century Knight in Burgundy. 5. Lazlo Ferran is cited in the 633 Squadron Wikipedia [citation 25] entry for his interview with Cliff Robertson.
Industry Endorsements
1. The Devil’s Own Dice received a five-star review from Maria Beltran for the Reader’s Favourite website. 2. The respected Beijing Review published an article on my books in China: http://www.bjreview.com/Lifestyle/201... 3. The defunct AHF Magazine https://www.amazon.co.uk/AHF-Magazine... published by the Wolfian Press, now Purple Unicorn Media, said The Hole Inside the Earth had ‘Lots of cool action and drew me well in’. 4. For endorsements of my work as editor, here is Amit Bobrov on my work for his novel ‘The Journals of Raymond Brooks’: ‘Lazlo’s the best editor I’ve worked with, and I’ve worked with a few. He took an already successful novel and found every imaginable flaw, corrected dialogues, fixed my grammar and altered key scenes to make them more exiting. He’s a fountain of creativity and knowledge. When I showed my Publisher his version of my novel they were speechless and this was a novel that three previous editor worked on.’ 5. I have more than 100 publications (25 as editor) to my name and more than 70 individual works. 6. With more than 100,000 of my books in the hands of readers, their popularity continues to prove that an independent, genre-busting approach can work.