Available now
The Farthest Shield
The lost legion of Carrhae marched east into history. One man marched all the way to China.
Historical fiction
The history makers left out of the record.
I'm a writer and a tinkerer. I write novels about the overlooked corners of history — the people and turns of fortune that quietly shaped the world we live in, and that most histories hurry past.
The new novel · The Ocean Sea, Book 1
The Western Passage
The idea was right. The ship was wrong.
Genoa, 1291. Everything the Indies produce comes west through a chain of hands, and every hand takes its cut. Ugolino Vivaldi, a merchant who can read the weight of a cargo from the way the porters carry it, means to go round the chain by sea: out through the Strait, down the coast of Africa, and the first hull in pays nothing to anybody.
Watch
The triptych in ninety seconds
From the first Roman fleet to the long road east of Carrhae — three novels, two centuries, and the battered shield that carries through all of them.
Available now
The Hammer and the Shield
Rome can win any battle fought on land. The sea belongs to Carthage.
A senator's disgraced second son who would rather read a hull than hold a sword, Manius answers his father and brother's drowning with an invention: the corvus, an iron-beaked boarding bridge that wins Rome the sea — and carries a flaw only its maker can see.
The Shield Triptych
Three standalone novels
Not a series — a set that rhymes. Each stands alone, bound by a single motif: the shield, and the people the record forgets.
