The Chosen Man

Book 1 of the Chosen Man Trilogy

In Early Spring 1635, a Spanish nobleman presents a Vatican cardinal with a proposition

by J.G. Harlond.

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Book 1 in The Chosen Man Trilogy.From the bulb of a rare flower blooms ambition and scandal. Rome 1635 – as Flanders braces for another long year of war, a Spanish count presents the Vatican with a means of disrupting the Dutch rebels’ booming economy. His plan is brilliant. They just need the right man to implement it.

Enter Ludovico da Portovenere, a charismatic spice and silk merchant. Intrigued by the Vatican’s proposal–and hungry for profit–Ludo sets off for Amsterdam. His voyage is interrupted, though, first by a storm, then by a pirate raid. The storm brings him a quick-witted young admirer he uses as a spy; the pirate raid brings him a girl, Alina, who won’t go home. Each development has significant consequences for Ludo’s plans and even greater ones for the people he is involved with.

Set in a world of international politics and domestic intrigue, The Chosen Man spins an engrossing tale about the Dutch financial scandal known as tulip mania–and shows how decisions made in high places can have terrible repercussions on innocent lives.

‘Be prepared to be immersed in this book. A well-written period novel that I highly recommend.’ Historical Novel Society Reviews

A recommended read and a ‘Discovered Diamond’. Discovering Diamonds Reviews

A Word from the Author

author picture J.G. Harlond by Jean Gill

Book One in The Chosen Man Trilogy began during a research trip for the sequel to The Empress Emerald at Cotehele, an early Tudor fort in Cornwall, England. While standing on the roof of the old tower, I watched Ludo da Portovenere, a Genoese merchant and occasional pirate, sail up the River Tamar in a barge. He was coming to collect Alina, a young Spanish woman and the love of his life. But this was near the end of a completely different story set much earlier than the mid-twentieth century.

What happens to Alina earlier in the new story came to me when I crossed to the other side of the roof and watched an evil-minded steward wearing seventeenth-century clothing stride between the main house and the old stable block. Alina’s vindictive mother-in-law was waiting for me indoors, in a portrait. In the space of a few minutes I had an historical crime novel set during the early 1600s, not the sequel to The Empress Emerald at all. But I had to write it; the new characters wouldn’t leave me alone.

Why Ludo goes ashore in Plymouth and sells Alina to an English nobleman, occurred to me while thinking about why he was sailing from the Mediterranean to Amsterdam. Ludo is a likable rogue, but he is also a thorough-going scoundrel so . . . he was buying tulip bulbs in Constantinople (where very few European merchants were allowed to enter) and selling them at exorbitant prices in Holland during ‘tulipmania’.

The rest of the story came out of extensive research, which threw up some quite surprising and even shocking data and events, including details about Vatican assassins – much of which I left out of the story for fear nobody would believe it. Almost all of what happens in the trilogy occurs in places in which I have either visited or lived in for a time. As my readers know, I have now been in Spain for many years and know quite a lot about its 17^th and 20^th century history. The rest of Ludo’s wicked adventures came down to hard work, and possibly a little too much imagination.

(J.G. Harlond, October 2020)