WHEN Ellie Stanton, an impoverished young postgraduate, is offered a job with the small, secretive and fabulously wealthy Monsalvat Bank in London, it is a chance too good to turn down – an invitation to join a world of wealth and privilege.

Against her better judgement, she accepts – only to find out that the bank is not all it seems. Ellie soon realises that her life belongs to her employers – and that they’re watching her every move.

Meanwhile, in medieval France, a young knight, Chrétien De Troyes is on a secret mission of murder.

But how are their stories related?

In his ninth novel, York author Tom Harper has conjured up a deeply satisfying ‘time-slip’ thriller, in which an ancient evil threatens the world.

Deep in the medieval vaults of the Monsalvat Bank, Ellie discovers, is a closely-guarded treasure of terrible power. And it just happens to be the same one for which Chrétien was searching centuries before… With its title and front-cover blurb – “Eight centuries of deceit hide a deadly secret” – this sounds like another Dan Brown-style potboiler.

It is much better than that, however. Tom – real name Edwin Thomas – knows his stuff, for a start. He studied medieval history at Oxford, and has already penned three successful novels about the crusades.

He also writes beautifully – his language lean, muscular and menacing. “It’s raining on the morning we come to kill the count,” starts the chapter which introduces the young Chrétien. “The raindrops make rings on the flat sea, a labyrinth of interlocking circles. Our shallow boats glide across the surface and disturb the pattern. The hulls are so thin I can feel the water beneath, like horseflesh.”

Chrétien De Troyes is historically famous as the French poet who put the romance into the Arthurian tales, and helped create the myth of the courtly, gentle knight. The knightly world to which Tom’s Chrétien belongs is anything but, however. The scenes featuring Ellie, meanwhile, start off as claustrophobic, become increasingly frightening, then explode into action.

The author, who live in Dringhouses with his wife, Emma, and two young children, Owen, aged two, and Matthew, just seven months, is now working on his next book – a novel about the Emperor Constantine, who was acclaimed emperor right here in York 2000 or so years ago. “I’m writing a scene set in York now!” he says when he answers the telephone. Writing isn’t always that easy with a young baby to look after, he concedes. “I’ve had to write a few pages typing one-handed, with the baby cuddled in the other arm. But he’s really good. He’s sleeping well!”

Constantine was the man who changed the world, by converting the Roman Empire to Christianity.

You’ll have to wait until next summer to read about him. But The Lazarus Vault is out next week. And it is guaranteed to keep you turning the pages.


The Lazarus Vault is published on September 30.