Tuesday, February 12, 2019

"The Ingenious"

Darius Hinks works and lives in Nottinghamshire, England. He spent the nineties playing guitar for the grunge band, Cable, but when his music career ended in a bitter lawsuit, he turned to writing. His first novel, Warrior Priest, won the David Gemmell Morningstar award and, so far at least, none of his novels have resulted in litigation.

Hinks applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Ingenious, and reported the following:
From page 69:
Phrater Alzen rushed through the Giberim Temple, his robes snapping behind him. The chamber was a vast sun-drenched octagon, topped with a magnificent, ribbed dome. The emerald-green walls were clad in a storm of copper lattice work, crashing and soaring around columns that reached hundreds of feet to cradle an undulating, honeycomb vault, an ocean of glass tiles, each facet staining the sunlight a different colour, spilling a profusion of reds, golds and blues that flashed across balustrades and walkways before igniting the gilded, mosaic floor, a circle of ceramic flames framing a polished onyx sun.

Another Curious Man rushed to his side, dressed in identical finery and looking equally harassed. It was his old friend, Phrater Ostan. “For God and the Temple,” whispered Alzen.

“God and the Temple,” Ostan replied.
Page 69 of The Ingenious is not very representative of the book. It showcases one aspect – the glorious, imposing, ostentatious nature of its brutal ruling elite (see below) but that’s not the overriding flavour of the novel – most of it is set in slums, brothels and doss houses as our lowlife ‘heroes’ try to halt their moral decline.
Visit Darius Hinks's website.

--Marshal Zeringue