When I did a reading for A King’s Ransom at my favorite book store, the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, AZ, this is how I was introduced by the owner, Barbara Peters, who is a good friend and has a keen sense of humor. “Sharon is here to talk about her latest entry in her five-book trilogy about the Angevin dynasty.” That amused the audience and me, too. It is true I’d initially planned to do three books about the first Plantagenet king, Henry II, his equally famous queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their notorious offspring, often called the Devil’s Brood. I launched the “trilogy” with When Christ and his Saints Slept, which began with the sinking of the White Ship, the twelfth century’s version of the Titanic tragedy, and ended with Henry and Eleanor in triumph, “sure that the world, like the English crown, was theirs for the taking.”

In the next book, Time and Chance, we learn that there was a snake in their Angevin Eden, two of them, in fact. Thomas Becket was Henry’s chancellor and best friend—until he was not. When he arranged for Becket to become Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry brushed aside Becket’s misgivings about being able to serve both his king and his God, joking that “The Almighty and I will not be in contention for your immortal soul, Thomas.” He’d envisioned a partnership; instead, he found himself at war with the Church, found an implacable foe in the man he’d loved like a brother. The other snake was named Rosamund Clifford. Henry and Eleanor had seemed perfectly matched, “two high-flying hawks lusting after empires and each other.” The worldly Eleanor had never demanded physical fidelity; it did not trouble her unduly that Rosamund shared Henry’s bed. But she would not share his heart, and because he did not understand that, cracks began to appear in the foundation of a marriage that had once seemed blessed both by God and Dame Fortune.

Devil’s Brood was to be the third book of the trilogy, the inevitable ending for a family torn asunder by ambitions and misunderstandings and unhealed wounds. But the ending was really only Henry’s, a tragic one at Chinon Castle, betrayed by the son he’d loved the most. There was still too much of their story to be told. And so the survivors took center stage, Eleanor, her sons, Richard and John, and her daughter Joanna, wed in childhood to the King of Sicily, now a young and vulnerable widow. Lionheart is their story, and the story of Berengaria, Richard’s sad queen. Lionheart is also the story of Richard’s exploits during the Third Crusade, where he proved again and again that he was one of the great battle commanders of the Middle Ages. The final novel of my five-book trilogy is A King’s Ransom, which deals with the ordeal that lay ahead of Richard as he sought to return home after signing a truce with Saladin. While Eleanor fought to save his kingdom from John and the French king, Richard endured savage storms at sea, an encounter with pirates, and two shipwrecks, only to be trapped in enemy territory, at the mercy of a man who had none.