1635: Cannon Law (1632 Series #5) » (Reprint)

Eric Flint's impressive first novel, Mother of Demons (Baen), was selected by SF Chronicle as one of the best novels of 1997. With David Drake he has written five popular novels in the Belisarius series, and begun a new fantasy adventure series, so far comprising The Philosophical Strangler and Forward the Mage. Flint received his masters degree in history from UCLA and was for many years a labor union activist. He lives in East Chicago, IL, with his wife and is working on still more books in the Ring of Fire series.

Andrew Dennis, in addition to co-writing the New York Times best seller, 1634: The Galileo Affair, had a story in Baen’s The Ring of Fire, and has had many non-fiction pieces published on the subjects of law and the paranormal. By way of a day job, he’s a lawyer and he lives in Preston, England with his wife and children.

Rome, 1635, and Grantville's diplomatic team, headed by Sharon Nichols, are making scant headway now it has become politically inexpedient for Pope Urban VIII to talk to them any more. Sharon doesn't mind, she has a wedding to plan. Frank Stone has moved to Rome and is attempting to bring about the revolution one pizza at a time. Cardinal Borja is gathering votes to bring the Church's reformers to a halt in their tracks, on the orders of the King of Spain. Meanwhile, trouble is brewing in the streets, shadowy agitators are stirring up trouble and Spain's armies are massed across the border in the Kingdom of Naples, Cardinal Barberini wants the pamphleteers to stop slandering him and it looks like it's going to be a long, hot summer. Except that Cardinal Borja has more ambitions than his masters in Madrid know about, and has the assistance of Spain's most notorious secret agent to bring about his sinister designs.

Publishers Weekly

Flint and Dennis's solid follow-up to 1634: The Galileo Affair (2004), also set in Renaissance Italy, offers a deliciously Machiavellian plot. The temporally displaced modern Americans from Grantsville, W.Va., having met with a surprisingly friendly reception from Pope Urban VIII, who views with favor some of the 20th-century reforms instituted by the Holy See, run afoul of the Spanish inquisitor Cardinal Gaspar Borja y Velasco. Borja regards Urban's failure to condemn the whole lot to the stake as proof that the pope is unfit to sit on the throne of St. Peter, and believes that Spain's political and military power has earned it and him the right to pre-eminence. The cardinal orchestrates a campaign of dirty tricks and rabble rousing to undermine the pontiff's capable but nepotistic family. If this novel is not as rollicking as its predecessor, that may be because there really isn't anything funny about the Spanish Inquisition, Monty Python notwithstanding. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.