This book disappeared from my booklist before even getting halfway through it, luckily I was able to retrieve it from my list of downloads.

As a matter of fact, it is part of a trilogy, so I was still unable to reach the end. However, bit is possible to get a better se se than before on where the writer was trying to go with this.

To begin with, it started out as a medieval romance/thriller. The heroine, Princess Isabella, is the daughter of a king who stands thoroughly on the side of might and right and the church of Rome, whilst Isabella has a mission to complete on behalf of her beloved, Etienne, who is one of the Knights Templar - an organisation that is now a treasonous for in the King's eyes. Isabella is placed under house arrest in the medieval equivalent of the Tower of London.

Two of her loyal nuns set out to complete the mission, Fransie and Caroline. And it is the character of Fransie rather than Isabella who becomes the heroine of this tale. It is here that instead of being a thriller, things now devolve into a kind of dungeons-and-dragons mystic quest, as occult/kabbalistic sigils manifest in doorways and within churches to lead the nuns and templars to crack the code. Strange animals become familiars to help prevent the followers from falling foul to the Seven deadly sins. One character, on falling victim to the sin of gluttony, grows an insatiable and murderous maw in his abdomen, consuming one of the main characters, pride, wrath and envy trap the others at various points in the telling.

It is not clear if the time frame is set during the time of the templars, as some of the characters have what to this reader seemed to be rather inconsistently modern names.

It seems that the main heroes and heroines have to assemble seven treasures before the bad guys do. These treasures maypossibly be related to seven heavenly virtues, though Dante does not really figure here, but rather the sacred path of the Kabbala and the tetragrammaton, with its asserted links to Fibonacci's golden ratio. These forms of esoterica seem to be close to the writer's heart, a pilgrim's progress behind the entertaining action. The pacing is fast, with a wide range of characters, some of whom get killed off often and sometimes gruesomely.

The idea of the trilogy is no doubt aimed to keep the reader gasping for more. Readers can judge for themselves if this might be their thing or not.