The Ballashiels Mysteries
2 primary works • 5 total works
Book 2
When an English Earl opens a forgotten room in his stately home - a room that has been locked since 1937 - he discovers a connection to his mother's tragic disappearance and re-awakens a decades-old conspiracy against his family.
Vengeful former servants have him in their sights, but it soon becomes clear that their agenda reaches far beyond the aristocrat and his forebears. As he unravels the connections between a lost Dali painting found in a Spanish cave, a time capsule buried at Flushing Meadows and his grandmother's friendship with Hitler's lover Unity Mitford, the Earl realises he has just hours to save millions from the horrifying true purpose of the conspirators.
Book 3
When hard-up aristocrat Lord `Ratty’ Ballashiels finds an old film reel in his attic he discovers that it’s a home movie of Charlie Chaplin’s visit to Rennes-le-Chateau in the south of France. But Ratty spots a strange anomaly: clearly visible behind Chaplin is the famous millionaire priest of that village, Bérenger Saunière. The film tin is labelled `Chaplin 1932’. Saunière died in 1917. Before Ratty can process the implication of what he has witnessed, the heat of the projector lamp ignites the film and starts a fire which rips through a wing of his manor house. Investigators subsequently discover a body amid the charred ruins and issue a warrant for Ratty’s arrest. The aristocrat has no intention of handing himself in. Knowing that Saunière reputedly buried a fabulous hoard of treasure, and convinced that the Chaplin film is a vital clue to its location, he stows away on a boat to France and becomes embroiled in a frightening and dangerous race to uncover the astonishing truth about Saunière’s legacy.
December 2012. There is global paranoia surrounding the predicted event described in the ancient scrolls recently discovered in the Sphinx: the resurrection of ancient malevolence in the form of Halford. His body has been preserved for 12 millennia in such condition that reanimation might be possible using the genesis procedure.
An ancient Mayan prophecy…
A dangerous Nazi descendant…
A passionate archaeologist…
And an aristocrat desperate for cash.
Mayan legends tell of a location where the secret to surviving the end of the world may be found. One part of that legend is recorded on a stone tablet in the dusty attic of Lord ‘Ratty’ Ballashiels’ crumbling manor. The other twin part disappeared from a Berlin museum when the Nazis took power. When Ratty seems about to sell his tablet to the adopted son of Josef Mengele, his friend, the archaeologist Ruby Towers, is appalled.
Soon it is clear that more than archaeology is at stake. The quest to rescue historic Central American artifacts becomes a race to prevent an apocalyptic threat when Ruby discovers that the ancients have set in motion something that will threaten the world today.
The Sphinx Swindle is the prequel to The Sphinx Scrolls.
Archaeologist Ruby Towers embarks on a televised search for the fabled Hall of Records within the Sphinx at Giza, unaware that her career is being manipulated from the shadows by a seedy television producer who has placed her at the heart of the greatest archaeological swindle of modern times. Meanwhile, her on-screen relationship with the documentary's presenter, Matt Mountebank, alarms her eccentric friend Lord 'Ratty' Ballashiels, who is viewing the nightly broadcasts from his crumbling English manor. Ratty flies to Cairo, plotting to carry out a desperate plan in front of the television cameras. When he arrives, the shocking consequences of the swindle start to unravel. Ruby's reputation is in tatters, and any hope of finding the real Hall of Records seems lost for a generation. Ratty has one last chance to make things right, but it will cost him everything...