1636: The Vatican Sanction

Book #24 in the multiple New York Times best-selling Ring of Fire series.

SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, 1636

It’s spring in Burgundy. The flowers are out and so are the cardinals—of Pope Urban’s renegade papacy, now on the run from the Vatican’s would-be usurper Borja. Most of the Church’s senior leaders have converged upon the city of Besancon, where the Pope plans to offer an ecumenical olive branch to the other Christian denominations with which Rome has been at war.

Fortunately, Urban has up-time help. He can rely upon Cardinal-Protector Larry Mazzare’s theological savvy, Sharon Nichols’ medical skills, and her husband Ruy Sanchez’s keen-eyed experience as a body-guard-in-chief. And even though Urban has a new Papal Guard in the form of Owen Rowe O’Neill’s Wild Geese, Mike Stearns has loaned the Pope a small contingent of the Hibernian Battalion—just in case.

Which is prudent, since Urban and his peace initiative are not merely at risk from Borja’s assassins. There is another, more deadly, team of professional killers in town, directed by the man who almost killed the Pope before: lethal Spanish mastermind Pedro Dolor.

Dolor hasn’t come to confess murder—he’s come to commit it.

Cover Art by Tom Kidd
Maps by Michael Knopp

Hardcover

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

First printing, December 2017

Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN-13: 978-1-4814-8277-6
eISBN: 978-1-62579-619-6

A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
https://www.baen.com

Electronic version by Baen Books
https://www.baen.com

1636: The Vatican Sanction

ISBN-13: 978-1-4814-8277-6eISBN: 978-1-62579-619-6

ISBN-13: 978-1-4814-8277-6
eISBN: 978-1-62579-619-6