Here we go! Today is the day!
Tom Walsingham is back in France – and right into the lion’s den!
It was never supposed to be the easiest of missions – but once Tom arrives in Rheims, deep into restless France, he finds that things are very different from what he and his powerful cousin, Sir Francis, had anticipated… And to find out just what threats are being prepared for Queen Elizabeth, this time our boy will have to take some really huge risks.
What’s worse, in theory he has plenty of support – but is there anyone he can really trust?
Aliases, betrayals, murders, looming war, lies aplenty, and a young rapscallion of a poet called Kit Marley… Tom is back for his most dangerous adventure yet!
Follow him as he tries to untangle, as Sir Francis would say, the joints and flexures of… Death in Rheims!
Book Three of the Tom Walsingham Mysteries is out today with Sapere Books. Findi it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback formats!
I’ve been neglecting my blogs in the most dreadful manner, lately. Can it be that I haven’t posted in five weeks? That I’ve even forgone the customary Christmas wishes? Oh dear me! The fact is, December was the tiniest tad intense – what with A Christmas Carol and handing in Tom Walsingham’s Book 3… 
Tony Riches is the author of of a number of richly researched, wonderfully vivid historical novels about several remarkable Tudor figures (and a few not-Tudor ones). 
They are about fourteen, a baker’s dozen of them or so, and ever so slightly miffed, because they had to give up an hour of sports to have me talk to them. The fact is, they are taking extra-curricular drama classes this year, and they’ll be staging a shortened version of my own Nellie Bly play at the end – so the teachers thought it a good idea to have the author discuss the play with the class. 
Among the many wonders of the Internet, there is the huge abundance of dictionaries, glossaries, thesauruses, lexicons, and such-like beautiful things.
This one comes from the Douai Diaries – the rather miscellaneous manuscript books chronicling, mostly in Latin, the day-to-day life, struggles and correspondence of William Allen’s band of English Catholics exiled in France. Allen built an English college in Douai, first – and when he was thrown out of what was, back then, Hapsburg land, moved the whole establishment to Reims, where it remained from 1578 to 1593. There he continued to instruct and ordain Catholic priests to send back in England as missionaries. A good deal of martyrs, plotters and fanatics passed through the colleges of both Douai and Reims… 
Scribblings 