Before He Was the Kingmaker(Richard Neville)

Most readers meet Richard Neville at the end. They know the fog at Barnet, the body stripped on the field, the tomb Henry VIII would later destroy as if to make sure no one could come and lay flowers.

I wanted to start somewhere else.

Blood of the Bear Book 1, Augusta Gosling

The Kingmaker's Spy, Book One of Blood of the Bear, opens in May 1455, days after First St Albans. Warwick is in his mid-twenties. He has just survived his first battle. He has watched men he knew die in a market square, and he has come back into a kingdom that has not yet decided what to do with what just happened. By the close of the book, in 1457, he will be Captain of Calais. The legend has not formed yet. He is still a man who can be surprised.

That is the Richard Neville I wanted to write. Not the schemer history reduced him to, but the young earl with too much intelligence and not yet enough caution, learning what loyalty costs and what it earns him.

Then there is Alice.

I did not invent her. She is in the records, the cousin of Warwick, daughter of his father's brother. What is strange is what the records do not say. She married at twenty-three. In an age when most noble women wed in their early teens, that is extraordinarily late. Her father went to Calais and she could easily have gone too. When she did marry, it was to John Conyers, son of the steward of Middleham, both men loyal to Warwick until the end. I find that very convenient.

So I filled the gaps the chronicles left empty. A long, secret loyalty. A discreet relationship that would explain why a man of Warwick's wealth and power left so little trace of any other affairs. A woman whose life makes sense if you read it one way, and almost no sense if you read it any other.

She is in The Kingmaker's Spy from the beginning. She is the person who knew him before he became the Kingmaker, and who would still be there long after he stopped being anything at all.

The series will follow them both for fifteen years. Through rebellions and betrayals, through Calais and Middleham, through crowns made and unmade. This is where they begin.

If you have been waiting for this one, thank you for waiting. If the Wars of the Roses are new to you, The Kingmaker's Spy is a good place to come in. You do not need to know the history. You only need to be willing to meet a man before the world decided who he was, and a woman the chronicles almost forgot.

You can find The Kingmaker's Spy on Amazon here: The Kingmaker's Spy