The Red Cross of Gold:. Books I & II (Assassin Chronicles) [Kindle Edition]

Brendan Carroll (Author)

Book Description

Buy both books in one volume and save money!

The immortal Knights of the Council of Twelve comprise the ruling body of the clandestine Order of the Red Cross of Gold, Poor Knights of Solomon's Temple. Some of them have been around since the Crusades in the Holy Lands, secretly directing, aiding and abetting world events that they believe will eventually culminate in the ultimate confrontation of Good and Evil at Armageddon. As Knights of Christ, they live, fight and die safely as God's executioners in the service of the Master of the Universe.

Book I:. The Knight of Death

The Red Cross of Gold is an ancient order of clandestine Templar Knights left over from the middle ages. A well-worn theme by now, of course, but these Knights are also left over from the middle ages. In fact, many of them are left over from even earlier ages. The story begins when one of them, whose job is dual in nature, Alchemist/Assassin, takes a trip to America in order to retrieve a deserter. The Grand Master’s Apprentice has broken his vows and run off with a couple of young women from Texas. Unfortunately, there is more to his desertion than is first surmised and a high priestess from a rival order is ready and waiting for him. Using an ancient alchemical solution to subdue the Assassin leaves him with a muddled brain and an unfortunate loss of memory. As he falls in love with one of captors, his memory returns in fits and starts by way of dreams and visions while his other captor tries to pry the secret of immortality from his highly disturbed mind. Things get much worse when the Grand Master declares him a possible threat to the order and sends three of his brethren knights to bring him home with or without his head attached to his body.
The surface tension is obvious, forbidden love, conflicted hero, naïve shallow heroine, ruthless antagonists, but there is a hidden conflict within the Assassin that foreshadows things to come in the Epic Fantasy series: The Assassin Chronicles. The series spans an entire century, starting in 2000 and stretching into the future as the mission and origins of the Order of the Red Cross of Gold and its member knights are revealed. Their tale begins in the shadows of prehistory and culminates with the coming of the New Age.


Book II:. The King of Terrors

Mark Ramsay returns to America bent on marrying the girl he left behind, but things are not well on the home front. Two members of his ancient Order set themselves on a dangerous course to stop him at all costs, believing that the marriage will cause the dissolution of the Order. However, his worst enemy lies much closer to his heart when his most beloved Brother weighs into the equation on the wrong side. The Knight of Death places everything on the line as he battles to save the life of his son and win back the woman he loves.

Product Details

• File Size: 2046 KB
• Print Length: 1005 pages
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B004O0U1II
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #232,604 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Spellbinding! November 14, 2012

By Johanna L Smith

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Fell in love with the charactors and how the author takes you back in time to explain some of each charactor's history. Love how the book keeps the Templars cloaked in mystery, a little bit of magic & religion, but not overpowering. Looking forward to reading the next in the series.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful start to an amazing series! July 28, 2012

By xirene

Format:Kindle Edition

I discovered this series last summer and it just swept me up and has carried me happily along with it. Getting the first two books together like this is a wonderful introduction to the story. Brendan Carroll is a gifted storyteller and has crafted complex, very real characters whom I've come to think of as old friends after all the adventures I've shared with them.

My only complaint with the series? I've lost too many hours of sleep and been tired the next day at work because I couldn't put the next book down ;)

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars love this series January 3, 2013

By lj

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Great historical series. As soon as I finish one I have to start on the next. Always leaves you wanting more.

10 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars None February 7, 2012

By Rebecca

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Wow! If you are looking at this, just go ahead and buy it. Seriously, I've just finished reading #25 and each one is a definite 5 star rating... I never give 5 stars! Now I find myself moping around, impatiently checking Amazon for the next instalment and desperately hoping they'll keep coming indefinitely. Go ahead my friend, you wont regret it... each book perfectly showcases the authors diverse knowledge and beautiful command of the english language, creating a story that is (honestly) almost impossible to put down.

4.0 out of 5 stars Really like novels that tell a good story June 14, 2013

By Donna Buchert

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Has a good story and several follow up books to continue the saga. I am looking forward to continue the stories.

2.0 out of 5 stars dreary reading June 13, 2013

By JAMES M TUTTLE

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Could not finish it. Book was too obtuse and beyond confusing. Plot was just dreary reading. I expected some action but got petty arguments among friends/enemies with a love/hate twist. The characters were not fully drawn out and the plot was incomprehensible.

2.0 out of 5 stars I usually enjoy this genre but June 7, 2013

By Drifter

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book just didn't work for me. I forced myself to finish the first and gave up on the second. All the elements were there, but the story didn't gel. I would have given it three stars but there were enough spelling, grammar and mixed up sentences to be irritating, so I have given it two stars.

More About the Author

Professional Note About Brendan Carroll:

Brendan Carroll spent his first fourteen years running free through the deep woods of the East Texas Pine Forests. During the early part of his life, he had the great fortune to live next door to his grandparents on a small family subsistence farm where he learned about nature, farming and story-telling from his grandfather. Throughout his childhood and early schooling, his first love was reading and after he learned to write, he found a new love... writing. Growing up in the late fifties and sixties, he watched the rock and roll and sexual revolution unfold all around him with a sense of something profoundly precious being thrown down by the onslaught of progress and plastic.

After high school, Brendan joined the Navy to see the world; unfortunately, the world he saw was confined to the Southeastern United States and his short but interesting military career carried him no further than Georgia, Tennessee and Florida. But his limitless curiosity about everything and anything took him straight from the Navy into college where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in teaching, graduating with honors, hoping to make a secure place for himself in Middle Class America. This dream did not play out as expected when he found himself employed as a Middle School Science teacher in a very small Texas town. Of his 140 or so students, he found only three actually interested in learning anything other than how to annoy each other, the faculty and still play football on Friday night in spite of failing grades. The former, they excelled in and the latter, they accomplished by convincing their parents that their failing grade was a completely the fault of the teacher.

After one year of teaching, Brendan changed careers from teacher to Correctional Officer for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice where he knew he would be safe from irate parents.

Eventually, he worked his way up to an administrative position with the State of Texas and spent twenty-three years serving as a public servant. In early 2010, he retired and took up writing full-time.

Brendan Carroll has been an avid reader and student of such subjects as mythology, quantum physics, environmental science, geology, archaeology, paleontology and astronomy. He has taken courses in astrology, numerology and other arcane subjects including alchemy, tarot and dream interpretation. His interests have taken him from the sterile labs of absolute science to the dusty attics of conspiracy theorists.

Always seeking to learn more and more, his varying interests and curiosity took him on a odyssey through religion as well. As a young boy, he attended a Pentecostal church. From there, he became a Baptist. Dissatisfied with those two, he studied with the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Mormons and eventually took catechism classes, intending to convert to Catholicism. When the conversion failed to take, Carroll had to look elsewhere. Naturally, Catholicism, or rather, the history of Catholicism drew his attention next and he began to study the religions of those persecuted and pushed into oblivion by the Church of Rome: the Cathars, the Egyptian Coptic Christians and the practitioners of the so-called Black Arts.

Eventually, Brendan discovered the amazing history of the Crusades and, in particular, the mythos and legends surrounding the Knights Templar. After devouring every documentary and book available on the subject of the poor Knights.

Brendan Carroll currently has twenty-nine books published through non-traditional channels at Amazon.com for Kindle, Smashwords.com for various other eReaders and through Amazon's print on demand paperback program.
The Assassin Chronicles series is drawing to a close with twenty-six of the thirty projected novels published. The series falls into the epic fantasy genre and details the adventures of the members of the Order of the Red Cross of Gold, poor Knights of Solomon's Temple. The series starts off with a relatively non-mystical, non-fantasy story of an Assassin/Alchemist warrior monk, who just happens to be around 800 years old. He loves the quiet life, working on turning base metals to gold providing the financial wherewithal for the Order, but his Assassin missions take him out of his comfort zone and into trouble. When he runs afoul of a woman bent on extracting the key of immortality from him, he loses his memory just long enough to fall from grace and bring on the wrath of his own Brothers of the Order.

Tempo Rubato ~ Stolen Time is a stand alone adventure novel with touches of Sci-Fi, Romance and Humor and was written before the Assassin Chronicles. The novel is a tribute to Mr. Carroll's favorite classical composer, Wolfgang Mozart.

The Hounds of Oblivion, another stand alone novel is a venture into the horror genre pitting a small town constable and a murder/mystery writer against the supernatural perpetrators of a string of gruesome murders while they are both under suspicion by the FBI. They must work together to find the murderers, solve the crime and clear themselves before the loves of their lives are killed or worse.
Personal Note About Brendan:

Brendan Carroll is probably the most eclectic person I know, having been his invisible friend for the past thirty years. He can never be relied upon to do the same thing twice simply because he can never remember what he did the first time. I call this the "Goose Syndrome". It is a common ailment found in humans with short attention spans, loose morals and infinitesimally small short-term memory banks. Everyday, he wakes up in a new world and has a great deal of trouble remembering where the coffee pot is, but if you were to ask him a question about, oh, say black holes or quasars, he could talk long and hard about them whilst he searched the kitchen for coffee filters. Ask him a question including a date such as an anniversary or a birthday and this terrible look of "Duh?" comes over his face. After scrounging for his date book and calendar or looking on-line for a few hours, he might come up with the answer. I said "might" because if he gets on the computer, he will immediately forget what he went there for and soon be surfing the web like a professional geek. This is... not good since he is certainly not a geek and has learned everything he knows about the computer from friends, relatives and incarcerated felons. So much for personality.
Brendan asked me to write these articles for his "About" page because he couldn't remember what he was "About" half the time. He explained that his "About" is normally defined by what others think he is "About". He has often expressed confusion and aggravation because friends, acquaintances, co-workers, family members and pets often make assumptions "About" him based on some random utterance and applied them to his overall Profile. This he finds highly amusing, yet sometimes disturbing and ofttimes troubling.
I would venture to say that Brendan is all "About" writing and entertaining his readers. He is NOT "About" worrying with details such as grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, flow, plot, French words designed to impress, continuation, etcetera, etcetera. He is all "About" the story, not about those bothersome little details. He leaves those entirely to his critics, reviewers and random comments left by drive-by, would-be editors looking for poor, grammatically undernourished fledgling authors just trying to get along in this dark, dark world... but I digress!
What is he "About"? He's about making people smile (both inside and outside his books). He's about making people laugh and making people cry (but only when necessary... I mean really, his main character or protagonist for all you literary perfectionists, is after all the Chevalier du Morte, Assassin and Alchemist for the Order of the Red Cross of Gold, poor Knight of Solomon's Temple.) If you have an assassin as a hero, then there is necessarily assassinations in the offing. Of course, Brendan's hero is sometimes a little less heroic than one might generally expect a hero to be. He is in fact, a bit grumpy, lacks a well-developed sense of humor, dresses mainly in black and carries a wicked broadsword along with a couple or three knives, discreetly placed of course and has a penchant for finding trouble at odd hours of the night. He also believes in faeries, much like Brendan in that respect and blames them for any number of noisome caprices. These are simply natural occurrences in my humble opinion, but I've never been able to convince Brendan or his precious Knight of Death otherwise.
Brendan loves nature as long as it is on the other side of the glass or fence or bars as the individual case may warrant. He loves zoos, for instance, where the larger and/or more or less friendly animals might be confined for closer viewing. He likes aquariums and he especially likes botanical gardens with indigenous life forms enclosed inside glass buildings such as the flora and fauna at Moody Gardens in Galveston, Texas. This is a fine place in his opinion to get to know the dangers and trials and tribulations associated with trekking through the rain forests.
He loves the beach. He likes looking at it through tinted glass windows with the AC on high from behind dark sunshades. (He is allergic to sand.) He loves whales, porpoises, seals, walruses, penguins, eels, nudibranchs, jellyfish, coral reefs, sharks and sunfish and is extremely glad that they all have a nice place to live... in the ocean where they belong.