Product Description

Fact collides with fiction in Will Adams third pulse-pounding adventure featuring the enigmatic Daniel Knox. Twenty years after vanishing without a trace, French archaeologist Roland Petitier makes a dramatic reappearance at a major Athens conference, promising an astonishing find - the legendary Golden Fleece. But before he can give his talk, he's found dead in a hotel room; and an out-of-control policeman puts Petitier's onetime protege Augustin Pascal into intensive care, then later accuses him of Petitier's murder. Only Augustin's two closest friends, Daniel Knox and Gaille Bonnard can prove his innocence. However, rumours of the fleece's rediscovery have spread, and. ambitious Georgian oligarch Nergadze is determined to get it first. He sends his psychopathic grandson Mikhail to Athens with orders to bring it back. Mikhail quickly becomes convinced that Dan Knox has it, and slowly moves in for the kill!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7224 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 536 pages

Review
The Alexander Cipher 'The action crackles along' Daily Mail 'A cracking adventure' Observer

From the Author
1. When did you start writing?
I’ve always written stories for fun, but I started out on my first novel when I was about seventeen, I think. It was awful.

2. Where do you write?
I’ve set my desk up so that I can stare out my window into my garden whenever I’m at a loss for words or ideas, which happens far too often. Sadly, all I’ve seen recently is rain.

3. What are the pros and cons of being a writer?
The best thing about being a writer is the freedom it gives you, and I don’t just mean to choose your own hours. You can pick a subject that intrigues you, then spend a whole year reading and daydreaming and writing about it. Then you can forget about it altogether and move onto something new. For most people, I think the solitude of writing is the hardest thing to deal with, but for me that’s actually a bonus. So I guess the hardest thing is something I’ve now thankfully put behind me (for the moment, at least), which is all the rejection you have to deal with before you get a success.

4. What writers have inspired you?
I loved the Greek myths when I was a child, and adventure stories too, which I think shows in the kind of books I write. As for specific writers, my life would be great deal drabber without PG Wodehouse and Robertson Davies, who both – in very different ways – seem to make the world more magical.

5. How important is a sense of place in your writing?
Very important. Books like mine depend heavily on building the right kind of atmosphere, with mystique and danger and the possibility of undiscovered tombs at every turning. Fortunately, my task is made a great deal easier by setting the books in Egypt and other such exotic places, rather than more everyday locations.

6. Do you spend a lot of time researching your novels?
Yes. I think I owe it to my readers to get the historical landscape in which I set my books as accurate as possible, so I do a great deal of background reading before I even start thinking about plot specifics. I also travel at least twice to the places in which the book is set, once at the beginning to get a sense of possible locations, and to see what kind of action could take place upon them, and then again after I’ve finished my first draft, to make sure I’ve got the details as accurate as possible (though if I have to shift things around a little to help the story, I’m quite prepared to do that).

7. Do your characters ever surprise you?
They rarely surprise me, but they constantly annoy me by flat-out refusing to do the things I need them to do, thus forcing me to rewrite my plots. If only they were more compliant, I could finish my books in half the time.

8. How much of your life and the people around you do you put into your books?
Sadly, my life is far too dull to make useful fodder for my books, although I do love to travel, and I suspect that comes across. As for using the people around me, I try to limit myself to the odd quirk or two that hopefully they won’t notice. That said, I have put people I know in my books. I’m just not saying who.

9. How did it feel when you saw your book in print for the first time?
I’ve had a fair bit published in my time, including some non-fiction books, so I wasn’t expecting it to be a big deal; but actually it was, it made me feel really proud. If you weren’t a writer, what would you be doing now? I don’t know, but I strongly suspect I’d be bad at it.

About the Author
Will Adams worked as a shop salesman, painter & decorator, warehouse porter and microfiche technician before joining a Washington DC-based firm of business history consultants, for whom he wrote a number of corporate histories and biographies, taking time off between projects to travel to remote places in search of exotic settings for his stories. He later worked as a communications consultant for a London agency before resigning and selling his flat to give himself a shot at fulfilling his lifelong ambition of becoming a novelist

Customer Reviews

No. 3 of the Knox adventures - not a memorable one
This is now no. 3 of the Knox - adventures and mysteries. Will Adams sticks to the she same style and ingredients as in his two previous novels "The Alexander Cipher" and "The Exodus Quest". Different angles lead to a dramatic climax. Knox is back, but rather a show of his former self. His character does not develop. The new characters - a sadist and a pedophile oligrach - do not carry the story. The historical bits do not create the specific atmosphere or generate this specific interest. It is still fast paced and partly entertaining, but the story never really takes off and graps one only party. I did not want to stop reading it, but as soon as you are finsihed it you will have forgotten about it. There is simpyl something missing. So it is an ok book but not at all a very good one. The last line promise a sequence but I hope Will Adams will improve here. He has the potential and I hope he is going to use it.

Nasty thriller with menace
I was very disappointed in this latest novel from Will Adams. The archaeological content is merely a thin veneer on top of a crime novel about a really nasty psychopathic killer (Mikhail Nergadze) from a wealthy but seriously flawed Georgian family living in Greece. Even the famous golden fleece becomes a throwaway item at the end of a book full of brutal confrontations described in detail. Since his hero(?antihero) Knox is not known for his fighting ability, he and his friends are completely out of their depth in any encounters with the psychopath and his gang and Knox's overcoming him at the end of the novel seemed farfetched to me.
The book is sold as an archaeological thriller and it is doubtful if it really fits this description in any way. I found the Nergadze family members far too unsavoury and I would not have bought this book had I known it was a crime novel about a vicious psychopath.

the lost labrinth
A good read with a few twists and turns, but needs to get his geography right. The sea to the north of Crete is known as "the sea of Crete"
and Greeks do not have carpets on the floor.