Templar Trilogy (3)

The third novel in the thrilling historical trilogy about the rise and fall of the powerful and mysterious Templars, from the author of the immensely popular Camulod Chronicles.Order in Chaos begins just prior to Friday the thirteenth of October 1307, the original Day of Infamy that marked the abrupt end of the Order of the Templars. On that day, without warning, King Philip IV sent his armies to arrest every Templar in France in a single morning. Then, with the aid of Pope Clement V, he seized all the Temple assets and set the Holy Inquisition against the Order. Forewarned at the last minute by the Grand Master himself, who has discovered the king's plot too late to thwart it, Sir William St. Clair flees France with the Temple's legendary treasure, taking with him several hundred knights, along with the Scots-born widow of a French Baron, the Lady Jessica Randolph. As time passes and the evidence of the French King's treachery becomes incontestable, St. Clair finds himself increasingly disillusioned and decides, on behalf of his Order, to abandon the past. He releases his men from their "sacred" vows of papal obedience and leads them into battle as Temple Knights one last time, in support of King Robert Bruce at the battle of Bannockburn. And in the aftermath of victory, he takes his surviving men away in search of another legend: the fabled land, mentioned in Templar lore, that lies beyond the Western Ocean and is known as Merica.

The second novel in the thrilling historical trilogy about the rise and fall of the powerful and mysterious Templars, from the author of the immensely popular Camulod Chronicles.

In 1187 one of the few survivors of the Battle of Hattin, young Scots Templar Alexander Sinclair, escapes into the desert despite his wounds. Sinclair has learned about the execution of the surviving Templars after the battle, so when he is rescued, he says nothing of his own standing among the Order of the Temple. Sinclair is one of the Inner Sanctum of the Order-a member of the ancient Brotherhood of Sion, a secret society within the secret society.

Two years after the battle, Sir Henry St. Clair is awakened after midnight by a visit from his liege lord, Richard the Lionheart. King Richard is assembling an army to free the Holy Land from the grip of Saladin and his Saracens, and he wants Sir Henry, his first and favorite teacher, to sail with him as his master-atarms. The old man is unwilling to go-he neither likes nor trusts Richard, having found him both a sadist and an egomaniac. But his future, and that of his young son Andr�, a rising knight in the order, depends on his allegiance to Richard. Sir Henry knows that Andr� worships his older cousin, Alexander Sinclair of the Scottish branch of their family, who has been in the Holy Land for years. Alexander will be an ally in an unfamiliar land. Sir Henry agrees to go despite serious misgivings about Richard, and his motives for war.

From the moment the first soldiers of the Third Crusade set foot in the Holy Land, the story of the three templars unfolds as the events of the campaign and the political and personal intrigues of the Crusade's leaders again bring the St. Clair family-and the Order-to the edge of disaster.

A brother of the Order-a medieval secret society uniting noble families in a sacred bond-Sir Hugh de Payens has emerged from the First Crusade a broken man seeking to dedicate his life to God. But the Order has other plans for him: to uncover a deadly secret that could shatter the very might of the Church itself.

From Publishers Weekly

Veteran of eight Arthurian novels (, etc.), Whyte turns to the Crusades with this tedious first volume of a Knights Templar trilogy. In 1088, young knight Hugh de Payens is initiated into the secret Order of the Rebirth of Sion, who believe the Christian Church to be "an invalid creation... built upon a myth." Founded by Jewish families fleeing the Romans, the Order believes that the truth about Jesus and the founding of Christianity lie buried beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. When Pope Urban calls for a Holy Crusade to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims, the Order"given to interminable monologues"sees an opportunity to perhaps retrieve those ancient documents and sends Sir Hugh and others to join the Crusaders, yakking the whole way. After the bloody fall of Jerusalem, Sir Hugh establishes a new order of warrior monks as a cover for the excavation of the Temple Mount, and the race is on to find the hidden treasure, if it exists, before their activities are discovered. This tepid Templar foray will be crowded out at the gates.

From Booklist

Readers of Whyte's Camulod series (eight novels set during the Arthurian period) will be very excited to jump into this, the first of a projected trilogy chronicling the birth of the Knights Templar. The novel begins in 1088, as Hugh St. Clair, a French nobleman, joins a mysterious society known as the Order. Soon Hugh is hip deep in the blood and gore of the First Crusade, which so scars him that he dedicates the rest of his life to serving God. But things don't go exactly according to plan, and soon Hugh is part of an elite band of monks whose religious devotion is matched by their skill at hand-to-hand combat. Whyte, a master at painting pictures on an epic-sized canvas, pulls the reader into the story with his usual deft combination of historical drama and old--fashioned adventure. One warning, though: when you put this one down, you may immediately begin salivating for volume 2.