In the fourth century a monk, Arinius, has been taxed with saving a document that the Christian leaders have decided is heretical. Kate is the Co-Founder and Chair of the Board of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction (previously the Orange Prize) and in June 2013, was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to literature. She has a particular knack for creating vivid action scenes — the blood, debris and panic of a bomb attack, or a skirmish – but she describes with equal precision the small, daily hardships of life under occupation: the endless paperwork, the difficulties of communication, the twitching curtains next door. It was as if she was holding back on this because ultimately she thought she might need them to change sides later, but wasn't quite sure so just left them in an ambiguous zone that was unhelpful and eventually served no purpose. Really, the book could have done without the Codex - the story of the brave women Resistance fighters is strong enough to stand on its own.

Like their ancestors who fought to protect their land from Northern invaders seven hundred years before, these women — codenamed Citadel — fight to liberate their home from the Germans. Loved Labyrinth and Sepulchre, and Citadel blew me away, combining some familiar and loved characters and introducing new generations too. There is no sense of discrimination from an industry that is nowadays entirely driven by money rather than literary worth or producing novels that are worthy at least in terms of enjoyment. In World War II, another man Audric Baillard is looking for the Codex, trying to keep it out of the hands of the Germans and others who would not honour it. In fact, I have not read the previous installments ( Labyrinth and Sepulchre) and didn’t even realize it was part of a trilogy until it arrived in the mail, and I was able to follow it just fine.Amongst those with the strongest sense of place, the ones that linger in my imagination, are the Languedoc trilogy by Kate Mosse. Mosse evinces both passion and planning in her presentation of this story, enough that I can understand what makes her so beloved of some readers. Citadel is both the name of a house in a small mountain village, and the name of a Resistance group, a group of women working actively to defeat the Germans.

Found the previous two books real page turners; this one was a slightly more laborious read and I'm not sure why.As I say, I loved the second half of the book and couldn't put my Kindle down and was utterly heartbroken at the conclusion; tears of joy and sadness. Citadel is a deeply satisfying literary adventure, brimming with all the romance, treachery and cliffhangers you would expect from the genre. But Authié wants Raoul for his own purposes: Raoul is in possession of a map belonging to his former comrade, Antoine, who died under torture at the hands of Authié's henchman without revealing its whereabouts.