Thank you very much for reading The Lost Ten. I very much hope that you enjoyed it. This is a story that I have wanted to tell for a long time. Reading the Byzantine historian Procopius many years ago, I first came across the sinister and exotic Persian prison-fortress called The Castle of Silence. Straight away I knew it had to form the basis of a novel. It would be the goal of a desperate rescue mission far behind enemy lines.

In The Lost Ten I set out to recreate the excitement and suspense of the classic thrillers of John Buchan and Alastair MacLean that I loved in my youth and still reread for pure pleasure. But I also wanted to introduce the tougher, hard-edged realities of contemporary tales of adventure such as Bravo Two Zero.

While the plot of The Lost Ten is fiction, the historical background is as accurate as the ancient sources and modern scholarship allow. Historical novelists owe it to their readers to do the research, and to get things right. The reader of The Lost Ten is taken on a journey across the Euphrates to the Tigris and beyond, far outside the settled frontiers of the Roman empire. Mesopotamia in the Third Century was a war ravaged borderland between Rome and Persia. The ‘Land between the Rivers’ was a melting pot of competing cultures and religions, where a Roman from the west would find some things familiar, but others as alien as does a modern reader. The Lost Ten aims to bring to life this fascinating and unsettling region.

If you enjoyed The Lost Ten, please do look out for my next novel, as yet untitled, which will be out in 2020. A soldier returns home from the sack of Corinth to find a killer stalking the hills of his native Calabria. The veteran has to unmask the culprit, and free his isolated community from the reign of terror. But suspicion soon falls upon himself, and he is haunted by some terrible secret from the destruction of the city. I’m thinking to blend together the fear and darkness of Scandi noir with the explosive action of my Warrior of Rome novels.

If you would like to hear more from me about this and my other future books, you can get in touch with me at www.bit.ly/HarrySidebottom where you can join the HARRY SIDEBOTTOM READERS’ CLUB. It only takes a few minutes, there is no catch and new members will automatically receive an exclusive e-book short story. Your data is private and confidential and will never be passed on to a third party, and I promise that I will only be in touch now and again with book news. If you want to unsubscribe, you can of course do that at any time.

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