The People's Covenant and God's Hammer have raged a Cold War that has lasted for over twenty years. A war without armies, where battles are fought in the dark and information is the most dangerous weapon. In this world -which sometimes seems the Middle Ages, sometimes the Renaissance and sometimes the Nineteenth Century- lives Y xtor Brandan, empirical adept at the service of the Queen of Albon . A relentless, amoral and unscrupulous character, Y xtor fights to recover his own past as he tries to prevent a new player in the espionage game to end the world, as he knows it.

Author Biography

Rodolfo Martinez (Spain, 1965) published his first short story in 1987 and soon became an indispensable writer of fantastic literature in Spain, although a feature that defines his work is the blending of genres, mixing them shamelessly with deceptive simplicity and numerous levels, from science fiction and fantasy to crime fiction and thriller. This makes his works hardly classifiable. Winner of the Minotauro Novel Award with his novel Los sicarios del cielo (Hitmen from Heaven), he has won numerous awards throughout his literary career, such as the Asturias Novel Award, the UPV Award of Fantastic Short Stories and on several occasions, the Ignotus Award (in the categories of novel, novella and short stories). His Holmesian work, consisting so far of four books, has been translated into Portuguese, Polish, Turkish and French and several of his stories have appeared in French publications. In 2009 with The Queen's Adept (now in English), he initiated a new cycle in which he mixes elements from action spy novels with some of the most characteristic themes and scenes of fantasy.