Title: Blood and Death
Product review: I enjoyed this refreshingly fast paced historical novel about a crucial 1565 Christian/Islamist confrontation at the island of Malta (just south of Italy). Christian knights against Islamic Janissaries in a months long siege of the vastly outnumbered and outgunned Christian defenders of the island.Prada excels in his description of weapons, military tactics and the grisly, brutal reality of 16th century hand to hand combat with swords, axes, pikes, spears and the like. He tries hard, and to an extent succeeds, in making you almost smell the blood, dust, urine, feces and rot of the battlefield.But I would have liked more historical context and many of the battlefield scenes in the second half of the book seemed plagiarized from the first half. He also goes a little overboard with his superhuman knights against the brave but dumb Turk horde.But read the book. Prata shows great promise as a writer of historical fiction.
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