Citadel

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In short, making it to the end, felt like a Herculanean struggle and one which I would not inflict on anyone. internationally bestselling author comes the third heart-stopping adventure exploring the incredible history, legends and hidden secrets of Carcassonne and the Languedoc. Really this was a little below 4 - only because some of the characterisation got a little "box-ticking" towards the very end. Kate Mosse is the multimillion selling author of four works of nonfiction, three plays, one volume of short stories and six novels, including the New York Times bestselling Labyrinth and Sepulchre.

When a bomb goes off at a crowded, peaceful demonstration, Raoul realises he has been set up by Authié to look like the perpetrator. Een prachtig verhaal wat geschiedenis, bon homme, een codex, een oorlog, en liefdesverhaal met elkaar verweven.After the protagonist is tortured, there is repeated reference to how she'll never have children as a result. I did not find the characters strong enough although the love story was very tender and I did find myself welling up in the end! Excellent subject matter-the courage of the resistance fighters and the cruelty of their captors was vividly described. This mixture of Nazis, ancient Christian artefacts and the supernatural is more than a little reminiscent of the Indiana Jones franchise, and Otto Rahn, the real-life medievalist turned SS officer who is said to have been the inspiration for George Lucas's films, is even referred to in the novel.

He goes on the run, aided by Sandrine and her sister, Marianne, who is already working with the resistance. It is clear that both time strands are set in the same place, the countryside of the Languedoc, the forests, the mountains, its people and language, and the weather, anchors the reader firmly in southern France. Up until that point, the hunt for Arinius’ Codex had been pleasantly archaeological, reminding me of the conspiratorial tones of Eco and Ruiz Zafón.Packed with some terrifyingly realistic action scenes, portraying the horrors of war and the evil that men can do to each other, it is also at times, gentle and down-to-earth - portraying the small French town and it's folk with incredible realism. The police were to protect, although many of them were involved with the Nazi's, who to trust was a significant problem. In fact, she's more than adept at writing two parallel tales with hundreds of years between the two. Meanwhile, the Resistance knows where the real Codex lies, but are too busy with pamphleteering to go and get it despite its potential to save their country.

The book wisely left out the details of what happened in the Jewish camps (for the most part) and astutely focused on the impact on the families left behind when someone was taken from them. Beneath his official guise, Authié is a kind of latter-day inquisitor, obsessed with restoring the purity of the Catholic faith; he knows that Antoine corresponded with Otto Rahn, and suspects that before Rahn's death the German passed to Antoine a map revealing the whereabouts of an ancient codex containing a secret so powerful it could change the course of the war.

Loved Labyrinth and Sepulchre, and Citadel blew me away, combining some familiar and loved characters and introducing new generations too. Worse still, rather than using language effectively and describing, the novel is often one long stream of dialogue after another. I then realised this is actually a book about the French Resistance in WW2, but I am so glad I stuck with it.