Scott Mariani

Toward the end of 2024, word began to get out that the thirtieth Ben Hope book, The Templar Secret, would be the last in the series. Oh my God, could it be true?! Suddenly I found myself inundated with so many emails from readers that I found myself struggling to keep up. I was determined to answer each and every message, though, and have been deeply touched by the hundreds of expressions of thanks for the pleasure that the Ben Hope books have given people over the years. No less touchingly, so many Ben fans have told me that they’d go on reading whatever I might come up with next. That’s great to know!

So what made me want to switch tracks and reinvent myself as a historical author? If you’ve followed the adventures of Ben Hope, then you’ll know that history is a subject dear to my heart. Just about every one of these modern-set thrillers featured a historical backstory, to a lesser or greater degree. Sometimes it was an integral part of the plot, other times it played more of a background role; but it was always there, and over the course of 30 novels Ben’s travels have led us on a tour of many various historical themes gathered from all over the world and ranging from way back in Biblical times to the more recent past, and everything in-between. While all the necessary research to write these stories was great fun and at times highly educational for me, every book took me in a radically different direction. Because I’ve always worked to a tight schedule producing two books a year, that meant that every six months I’d have to leave behind whatever fascinating historical world I’d been so immersed in, clear it all from my head and plunge straight into the next. It’s like being a perpetual globetrotter, always on the move, and never being able to stay in one location for long even though you might have fallen in love with the place and wanted to live there forever.

Then one day while I was writing Ben Hope 28, The Tudor Deception, and deep into all the intrigues of medieval England, I thought: ‘You know what, I really love being here reading and writing about all this medieval stuff. What if I could just keep on doing that?’ The thought wouldn’t let go of me. Suddenly the eternal traveller had found somewhere he really wanted to settle down in and call home.

Of course, I knew I couldn’t, because as soon as that book was finished I was off again, this time to China for The Golden Library. Which as interesting as that was for me, nonetheless left me with pangs of longing to get back to my favourite subject.

Meanwhile, after more than fifteen years the Ben Hope series was inching closer to the thirty-book mark. That’s a pretty extensive series, longer than many. So the idea began to germinate in my mind that the end of Book 30 might be a good place to let Ben Hope hang up his spurs and enjoy the respite he deserved after all the tortures I’d put him through over the years. This would also give me the opportunity to embark on a new direction: rather than keep on inserting a mixture of historical backgrounds and mysteries into modern-day thrillers as I’d been doing for so long, I could devise a new character and set him straight into the medieval historical world I love so much . .  and stay there for the duration of a whole series! What better way to create a truly immersive experience for readers interested in our rich past?

If that sounds like it was an easy decision to make, it wasn’t. A whole new start – new publisher, new editor, new character, new storylines, new everything – was bound to be a fairly disruptive and even traumatic experience. But as tough as it was to make the break, I knew it was the right thing to do. Finally, after much agonising, I plucked up the courage and followed my heart.

So here we are. April 2025 sees the launch of a new series of adventures that take us all the way back in time to the late 12^th century and the absolutely epic history of the Third Crusade. We follow the fortunes of a young Englishman, Will Bowman, who is living a peaceful life in rural Oxfordshire with his pregnant wife Beatrice when his life is torn apart by a gang of marauding knights. They raid and burn his homestead, tragically murder Beatrice and leave Will for dead. After discovering that these soldiers were travelling to join up with King Richard the Lionheart’s expedition to the Holy Land, Will vows vengeance and sets off to catch up with them . . . I won’t tell you how it ends, but there are a lot of thrills and escapades along the way. Book 1 is titled The Pilgrim’s Revenge and it’s published by Hodder & Stoughton. Book 2, The Knight’s Pledge, follows in December.

Whether or not you have read the Ben Hope books, I hope you’ll want to follow Will Bowman on his adventurous quest to the Holy Land and beyond.