The Blacksmith

How is the king like a blacksmith? He has a hammer as well as a sword.

Duncan Archer has heard that riddle many times, but he doesn’t know what it means. No one does, not even the members of the Royal Guild of Swordsmiths. It isn’t Duncan’s business anyway. Good sense tells him to stick to beating iron into shape for the residents of his backwater town, and not worry about the king and his nobles pounding Frankland into the ground.

But good sense never stopped Duncan from poking his nose into everyone else’s business. If it had, he might not be a fugitive, the subject of the biggest manhunt in the country’s history.

With a charge of murder hanging over his head like a sword, understanding that riddle becomes much more urgent…

About the Author

Barbara Howe lives on the third rock from the sun, but her imagination travels the universe and beyond. Born in the US (North Carolina), she spent most of her adult life in New Jersey, working in the software industry, on projects ranging from low-level kernel ports to multi-million-dollar financial applications. She moved to New Zealand in 2009, gained dual citizenship, and now works as a software developer in the movie industry. She lives in Wellington, in a house overflowing with books and jigsaw puzzles, and wishes she had more time time to spend universe hopping.

Frustrated from back-to-back readings of several novels filled with bad writing and appalling portrayals of intelligent women, Barbara thought she could do better, and wrote down the critical scenes from one of the movies playing in her daydreams. Her husband and daughter loved them, and demanded more. Those scenes grew into her first novel, The Locksmith, and now undammed, the ink keeps flowing.