Cut Throat

Publisher Marketing: Cut Throat "A man never knows what may happen in the middle of a murder. It certainly never occurred to the Irishman, even as he cut his victim's throat, that he might in that moment meet the love of his life." Interrupted while cutting the throat of a pretender to the Norwegian throne, O'Neill, an Irish assassin in the employ of the Venetian inquisition, looks up to find himself being studiously observed by his victim's beautiful young wife, and now widow, the lady Tora Sigurdsdotter. It is love at first sight. Set in the years following the 14th-Century Black Death, the epic tale of their romance, and the bloody trail they leave across northern Europe, unfolds against a background of battlefields, pirate ships, burning cities, and the cruel intrigues of princes, as O'Neill teaches Tora the arts of the hired killer. They acquire a household of misfits and outcasts around them: the half-witted Yorick Numbskull, who flies into a murderous rage whenever the lady Tora is under threat, Dr. Kettil Rune, an old wizard and charlatan who has dyed himself blue from swallowing silver, Zikzak, a 14-year-old prostitute and sneak-thief, and perhaps the cleverest of all of them, Sweynnie, the little Norwegian puffin-hound, who guides pirate fleets in the dark and follows his master across half of Germany. Based on recorded events and boasting a supporting cast of real-life characters, this is the stunningly bloodthirsty first novel of academic historian Eva Prima, written in a dry, darkly humorous tone that one advance reader has described as "like a Tarantino remake of the Seventh Seal."