£12.00
The Alchemist’s Codex is the eighth book in the Eden Black Archaeological Thriller series.
Please note that this is a pre-order. The Alchemist’s Codex will be released generally on the 24th of October, orders via this store will be processed and shipped a few days before that. Due to printing and shipping times, I don’t know exactly how long that’ll take, but all going well you’ll have your copy around the 24th.
Please read before ordering:
Please be aware, I can’t compete with big stores when it comes to printing and shipping times. Your order may have to be printed once the order is placed. Including shipping, and depending on where you are in the world, it can take a couple of weeks. These books aren’t quick, but they sure are beautiful!
Import taxes:
Please be aware that you may have to pay a customs charge from your country when receiving parcels from me here in the UK. I know, it’s annoying for us all. The courier will email you about this, so please make sure your email address is filled in correctly when ordering and check your junk folder regularly. I know, it’s a pain. Ultimately, this is your responsibility, as they won’t even let me know the problem. If you’re unsure, please check before ordering.
If you have any question before or after ordering, please get in touch: hello@lukerichardsonauthor.com
Returns and questions:
If you’re not totally satisfied with your book, please get in touch and we will do everything we can to put that right. Please be aware, as it’s just Luke and Mrs R working tirelessly to research, write and publish all these books, it may take a day or so for us to reply. We are humans and appreciate smiles: hello@lukerichardsonauthor.com
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What if the Notre-Dame fire wasn’t an accident, but an attempt to find something hidden beneath Paris for hundreds of years?
When Eden Black discovers the body of a murdered man inside the cathedral, one detail makes no sense: he appears to be centuries old. Could this be Fulcanelli, the legendary master alchemist who vanished without a trace, leaving behind only whispers of a lost codex?
But Eden’s not the only one searching. A pharmaceutical billionaire has already spent a fortune looking for the codex. He’s found nothing, and his time is running out.
Eden follows the trail deep into the catacombs, through a Renaissance château and to the last stronghold of the Cathars, with the billionaire’s men one step behind. Every clue points to the same impossible conclusion: the secret of eternal life is real. And someone has already used it.
A race-against-time archaeological thriller for fans of Dan Brown, Scott Mariani, Steve Berry and James Rollins.
Please read before ordering:Please be aware, I can’t compete with big stores when it comes to printing and shipping times. Your order may have to be printed once the order is placed. Including shipping, and depending on where you are in the world, it can take a couple of weeks. These books aren’t quick, but they sure are beautiful!Import taxes. Please be aware that you may have to pay a customs charge from your country when receiving parcels from me here in the UK. I know, it’s annoying for us all. The courier will email you about this, so please make sure your email address is filled in correctly when ordering and check your junk folder regularly. I know, it’s a pain. Ultimately, this is your responsibility, as they won’t even let me know the problem. If you’re unsure, please check before ordering.
Returns and questions. If you’re not totally satisfied with your book, please get in touch and we will do everything we can to put that right. Please be aware, as it’s just Luke and Mrs R working tirelessly to research, write and publish all these books, it may take a day or so for us to reply. We are humans and appreciate smiles :D. hello@lukerichardsonauthor.com
| Weight | 0.381 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 20.3 × 12.7 × 2.3 cm |
Although each of the books is a standalone adventure, they are best read in this order:
1. The Ark Files — where it all begins.
2. The Giza Protocol — ancient secrets, new dangers.
3. The Atlantis Agenda — the hunt for Atlantis begins.
4. The Titanic Deception — what if the Titanic never struck an iceberg?
5. The Templar Enigma — Templar secrets and ancient prophecies.
6. The Lotus Key — one artefact, world-changing stakes.
7. The Sahara Event — what if Atlantis was never beneath the sea, but under the sand?
8. The Alchemist’s Codex — the fire at Notre-Dame was no accident. It was a cover.
The bones of it are true. Fulcanelli existed, Canseliet existed, Hitler did make his one visit to Paris on 23 June 1940 and did stop at the Sacré-Cœur. The Château de Dampierre’s ceiling, Les UX, Montségur and Saint-Merri are all exactly as described. The Codex, the villain and what Eden finds are mine. My rule with every book is the same: if a reader stands on the spot, they should recognise it.
Yes, and that’s what hooked me. Fulcanelli was a French alchemist who published Le Mystère des Cathédrales in 1926, arguing that Notre-Dame and the other great Gothic cathedrals were alchemical textbooks written in stone. Then he vanished. Nobody has ever proved who he really was, and his student Canseliet claimed to have met him decades later looking younger than before. There are even stories that he warned a French intelligence officer about nuclear weapons years before Hiroshima. I’ve taken the legend and asked: what if the book he published was only the public, cryptic version of his work, and the real one is still out there?
No. Every Eden Black thriller is written to stand on its own, and this one opens with a new case and a new villain. That said, the events of the previous adventure in the desert cast a long shadow over this story, and readers who know what happened there will spot the fallout straight away. If you’d like to start at the beginning, the series page has the reading order.
It is, and I thought hard about how to handle it. The 2019 fire and the extraordinary rebuild that followed are the backdrop for the whole book. I haven’t invented a new cause for the fire. What I have done is ask what a very rich, very determined man might do with a restoration project if he believed there was something hidden under the cathedral. Notre-Dame has changed enormously over the centuries, and the novel makes use of what was lost, what was rebuilt and what the restoration workers actually found beneath the floor.
Most of the real locations are places you can visit. The Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre, Notre-Dame and its towers, the Panthéon, the catacombs and Église Saint-Merri all feature. Then the story heads out of the city to the Château de Dampierre-sur-Boutonne in Charente-Maritime, a Renaissance château whose gallery ceiling is covered in alchemical emblems, and finally south to Montségur in the Pyrenees. If you’re planning a trip, I’ve written about several of these on the travel pages of this site.
They are. Les UX, or the Urban eXperiment, are a secretive Paris collective who slip into the tunnels and forgotten spaces beneath the city and quietly restore them. They famously built a hidden cinema under the Trocadéro and repaired a clock in the Panthéon without anyone’s permission. I’ve wanted to write about them for years. In the book, Eden and her father need their help to get somewhere the authorities would rather nobody went.
There’s a great deal of real alchemical history. The cathedrals of France really are decorated with figures that alchemists read as instructions, from the salamander to the philosopher’s stone. Nicolas Flamel, the medieval Parisian bookseller who was supposedly made immortal by a mysterious book, is very much part of the story. So are the Cathars of Montségur and the 1930s writer Otto Rahn, who went looking for the Holy Grail there and came to a sad end. I’ve kept the history accurate and let the fiction grow out of the gaps.
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