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The Malice of Fortune
The Malice of Fortune
Sep 11, 2025 11:30 PM

Author:Michael Ennis

The Malice of Fortune

Welcome to the Devil’s house.

A nest of vipers dwells within.

And a trail of blood leads to the Borgia Palace ...

Against a teeming canvas of Borgia politics, Niccolò Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci come together to unmask a serial killer. Through a labyrinth of ancient superstition and erotic obsession they discover an evil and terrible secret – one that still lies buried in the lines of Machiavelli’s greatest work, The Prince.

Reviews

A highly intelligent historical thriller

—— The Sunday Times

Ennis' gripping historical thriller conjures up the unpredictable, dangerous world of Renaissance Italy with great panache.

—— BBC History Magazine

Vivid, well defined, THE MALICE OF FORTUNE captures the glorious and gritty details of Renaissance Italy in a propulsive story.

—— Mathew Pearl, author of THE DANTE CLUB

Fascinating, engrossing and wickedly clever. THE MALICE OF FORTUNE captured my attention up front and kept me turning the pages to the very end.

—— Douglas Preston

THE MALICE OF FORTUNE dishes out a simmering stew, thick with chicanery, bloodshed, dastardly deeds, code-breaking and puzzle-solving.

—— Katherine Neville, author of THE EIGHT

A powerful thinking-man's thriller.

—— Glenn Cooper, author of LIBRARY OF THE DEAD

an intelligent historical thriller

—— The Lady

A genial mix of satire, fantasy and the comically prosaic

—— James Urquhart , Financial Times

I wish more novelists writing in English exhibited this much intellectual ambition, and this much humanity and elegance in realising it

—— Chris Ross , The Guardian

A beautiful, hopeful novel

—— Observer

Superb... [Ackroyd] makes the familiar deliciously mysterious

—— Saga

In a slender novel, London's great fictional mapper Peter Ackroyd has woven together a rich spread of tales of the city

—— Tina Jackson , Metro

Ackroyd writes about the capital, from Camden to Chelsea, like no-one else and he captures the sense of the sixties perfectly, with high-society and low-life London so dangerously close to each other. Full of twists and turns, this is Ackroyd's most exciting novel to date

—— Good Book Guide

A classic Ackroyd tale that will not fail to please

—— Victoria Clark, 4 stars , Lady

With its distinctive language, structure and narrative approach, Lenin's Kisses presents a distictive version of 'rural china' and 'revolutionary China', even while establishing a new literary 'native China'

—— Contemporary Literature Commentary

Yan Lianke sees and describes his characters with great tenderness . . . this talented and sensitive writer exposes the absurdity of our time

—— La Croix

Sophie Hannah is a real star.

—— Daily Telegraph

Sophie Hannah has quickly established herself as a doyenne of the 'home horror' school of psychological tension, taking domestic situations and wringing from them dark, gothic thrills.

—— Financial Times

Hannah is a master of intense psychological thrillers . . . Full of twists and turns, and terrifying, too.

—— heat

She grips from start to finish - a grip which held me against my will because the sustained atmosphere of mild hysteria is hard to take . . . I couldn't put it down.

—— Literary Review

Pynchon’s latest novel is a historical romance set in during the internet’s infancy in the spring of 2001.

—— Jo Ellison and Violet Henderson , Vogue

Bleeding Edge is a romp. On full display are Pynchon’s trademark linguistic and imaginative acrobatics… It may sound frivolous but an emotional maturity counterpoints the silly songs, deliberately bad puns, and pop-cultural references

—— Irish Examiner

When he’s in his hardboiled vein, [Pynchon] writes the most entertaining dialogue in any year.

—— Tom Stoppard , Guardian

Pynchon's best novel since Mason & Dixon, an exhilarating shaggy-dog private-detective story that punctured its own garrulous charm with sharp stabs of betrayal and threat. Astonishing, too, that that a 76-year-old should produce a novel with such wild and slangy bounce.

—— Tim Martin , Telegraph

Pynchon at his most hilarious, it gave way to more sombre realities involving a suspicious Silicon Alley tech company and its possible links to international terrorism and who knows what else.

—— Uncut

Suspenseful and darkly humorous.

—— Michael Dirda , Times Literary Supplement

Intriguing, and probably the most straightforwardly readable of his books.

—— Gordon Brewer , Herald

A thrilling ride through the first tech bubble, filled with "bleeding edge" technology... Accomplished, funny and digressive.

—— Financial Times

Pynchon's take on the attack on the Twin Towers. Will he reject the conspiracy theories of the "truthers" or spin some new conspiracies of his own? I think the answer is both. But I wouldn't swear to it.

—— Gordon Brewer , Scotsman

· Pynchon delivered a piece of typically raggedy brilliance with Bleeding Edge.

—— Stuart Kelly , Scotsman

Engrossing, hilarious and shocking.

—— Jonathan Jones , Guardian

Pynchon’s high-energy writing crackles with dark wit and foreboding

—— Mail on Sunday

Playful and paranoid New York noir

—— Adam Boulton , New Statesman

Readers will have to decide for themselves how they feel about an open-ended mystery, but for those who don’t care so much about the destination, the journey is more than worth it

—— Stephen Joyce , Nudge
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