I have just published The Ming Admiral, my second novel,
which got 5 stars from Red City Reviews.
It is available on all ebook sites and in paperback from
Create Space. I have ordered some for local sales and people can order directly
from me through my e-mail address -
My third book, Destinies Divided, a sequel to Memories in
the Bone, is being edited and will be out by March. This is very timely though
unplanned, because a third of the book deals with the Chinese involvement with WW1. So I hope
it will make a few waves.
The Ming Admiral: A
Chinese Odyssey
A synopsis
China 1382
A new emperor has been on the throne since
1368 and proceeds to cleanse the empire of the supporters of the previous
Muslim Mongol dynasty. The village of Kunyang is destroyed and its young taken
into slavery. Out of this chaos, an exceptionally gifted boy born with a
recessive gene; grows to become the right hand man of the founding emperor’s
third son, the Warrior Prince Zhu Di, helping him take the throne from the mandated
heir, his nephew.
At the age
of seventeen he is chosen by the Prince and made his aide-de-camp. Born Ma He,
he is renamed ZhengHe, warrior, poet, diplomat and finally, Grand Admiral of
the Treasure Fleet. He falls in love with his childhood betrothed, only to be
castrated on the Prince’s orders to prevent a possible usurpation of the Dragon
Throne.
ZhengHe’s adulation of Zhu Di now turns to
hate, but he is tied to his destiny to serve him on every front. He is rewarded
with the total responsibility of the Treasure Ships, commissioned to sail the
world to bring the gifts and refinements of the Chinese Court in exchange for
vassalage. A secret agenda is to hunt for the former Emperor Jianwen and his mother, the cruel Empress Dowager Chun Yun who had
ZhengHe’s love, AlinYa, murdered before they fled the capital Nanjing.
Within Zhu Di’s reign, ZhengHe makes six
voyages. Amongst other exotic animals he brings back a giraffe to delight the
Emperor with the suggestion that it is the Qilin, the heavenly unicorn to
mandate his reign. Then a stunning secret forces him to make a secret alliance
with Le Loi, a Vietnamese aristocrat fighting for his country’s freedom and it
takes all ZhengHe’s diplomatic skills in trading that secret for the surrender
of the former emperor hiding out in the jungles of Vietnam.
Eventually,
Zhu Di commits his greatest crime against humanity with the execution of two
thousand concubines and the eunuchs suspected of cavorting with them. ZhengHe
abandons the Emperor in disgust to go on his sixth voyage. In his absence Zhu
Di goes off to war against the Mongol Urugtai and dies on the steppes. This
necessitates the army melting down countless pots and pans to make a steel
coffin to transport his body back to Beijing where, under his orders, his heir
and government have to wait for ZhengHe’s presence to bury him.
With the death of Zhu Di, the most
enlightened emperor China has ever known, the mandarins at last have their
revenge. The Treasure Ships are grounded, maps and books burnt and ZhengHe is
forced into early retirement as the humble harbour master of Nanjing.
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