Historical thriller, parallel novel to Dumas' Three Musketeers: hunchback Louis d'Astarac, to cure himself and win his lady, seeks the alchemical magic secrets of a lost Rosicrucian book, competing with Cardinal Richelieu, the Jesuits, English agents, and heretical cultists, while crossing paths time and again with d'Artagnan and the musketeers. Swashbuckling historical thriller, a parallel novel to Dumas's The Three Musketeers: In 1619 the esoteric and forbidden magic of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood was compiled into a single volume, The Three Mystic Heirs, a book furiously destroyed by the Inquisition-except for one copy! And Louis d'Astarac thinks he knows how to find it. Louis is a young French noble, witty, cultured, and trained in all the social graces of a 17th century courtier. But he's also a hunchback, stunted and deformed. Rejected by his lady-love Isabeau, Louis, desperate, can see only one way to win her hand: cure his condition by using the secrets of spiritual alchemy hidden in The Three Mystic Heirs. The trail of the lost volume leads Louis to Paris, where he finds a friend in a young scholar named René Descartes-and an encounter with bloody murder. For the power of the Rosicrucian secrets is said to be great beyond measure, and the high and the mighty of Europe are after it as well. Louis becomes a player in a fast-moving game between agents of England's Duke of Buckingham, France's Cardinal Richelieu, the Jesuit Order of Rome ... and the shadowy Rosicrucians themselves. And who is this noisy swordsman d'Artagnan, with his cronies the Three Musketeers, who keeps popping up at every turn? The Rose Knight's Crucifixion, a Novel of Historical Adventure and a Romance of Ideas, Perversely Contiguous to Dumas's The Three Musketeers, Volume One: The Three Mystic Heirs: magic, romance, and adventure await!
About the Author: Lawrence Ellsworth is the pen name of Lawrence Schick, who began his career as a writer at TSR Hobbies in the late 1970s, where he wrote, developed, and edited a number of titles for the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. When Ellsworth was a boy in the 1960s, publishers were reprinting many of the best pulp tales in inexpensive paperbacks, so Harold Lamb, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard enthralled Ellsworth at an early age. Poring through the libraries for any book in which the hero wore a sword soon led him to Dumas, Sabatini, Orczy, Tolkien, H. Rider Haggard, and Arthur Conan Doyle's historicals. In the early 1990s Ellsworth led a troupe of writers who produced live-action role-playing weekends. While writing and researching The King's Musketeers for this troupe, he became fascinated with early 17th-century France. This rekindled his interest in swashbuckler fiction, and he has since become a noted collector and authority on the subject, and his anthology, The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, was published in 2015. Ellsworth learned French so he could read Dumas's novels in the original language. His acclaimed translation of Alexandre Dumas's "lost" sequel to The Three Musketeers, The Red Sphinx, was published in 2017, and followed up by his own translation of The Three Musketeers in 2018. (All of the above are published by Pegasus Books of New York and London.) Ellsworth has three children, Wyatt, Sanderson, and Honor, and lives in northern Maryland near Baltimore.