Order in Chaos

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The task of acknowledging the assistance and goodwill generated by contributors to any work of historical fiction is always a daunting one, raising fears of offending by omission, simply because the range of people who have contributed to the finished work, whether from their personal knowledge and research or by offering insights or encouragement, is always vast. I always start each book full of good intentions, resolved to make note of everyone to whom I should be grateful, but in the heat of writing the actual work, I invariably fall behind in doing so and end up wondering whom I’ve forgotten.

There are some people, however, whose contributions to what I do have been invaluable, and most of those are the writers and academics whose own works have inspired me and informed my efforts to grapple with the job of sorting fact from fancy and to extrapolate my own tale, with all its speculations, interpretations, and outright flights of authorial fancy. I have no doubt at all that much of the licenses I take in constructing my tales would pain some of the people who originally nudged my thoughts in the directions I have pursued, but the errors, transgressions, and omissions I commit herein are my own, and most emphatically not theirs. I have read widely in the years of preparing and completing this trilogy, and my sincere thanks go to several distinguished authors who have made me stop and think, compare events and opinions, and then proceed in the fictional directions they have indicated to me, mostly without their intent. Paramount among those have been Piers Paul Read (The Templars), Barbara W. Tuchman (Bible and Sword), and Malcolm Barber (The New Knighthood).

I also acknowledge, freely and with gratitude, the invaluable collaboration and assistance of my hands-on editors, Catherine Marjoribanks and Shaun Oakey, whose individual skills, after years of working with them, never fail to awe and impress me. To them, and to all the other Penguins at Penguin Group Canada, my sincere thanks.

Jack Whyte

Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada

January 2009