Samantha Sutton and the Winter of the Warrior Queen by Jordan Jacobs

Jordan Jacobs is an archaeologist, Head of Cultural Policy at UC Berkeley's Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology. He's also a fantastically gifted writer, and his new novel has just come out. I saw a draft of part of this a while back and we corresponded about it, but was asked to keep it quiet. Now it's published, I guess it's OK to draw attention to it. The first in the series "the Labyrinth of Lies" was set in an exotic location and the looters were the stereotypical swarthy machete-in-the-jungle type. I wrote about it here. In this one, the problem is ... metal detectorists in the UK. I'll be interested to see which of my comments about the metal detectorists made it to the final draft. In the first draft, though already not-the-good-guys, they were a bit sanitised. In the interests of realism, I suggested a few changes.

Now I swear that I did not prompt the wording of the end bit of page 351, following the bit about the 'not-really-Colin-Renfrew'. I did not know that Jordan was going to put this final thought at the end of the book (but am extremely glad that he did):

Yes ! Yes they jolly well have.  Neither did I know I was going to get an acknowledgement (or that my colleague Chris Evans who I am collaborating with on another project at the moment) was also involved. Still less did I suggest the wording here.... But the end sounds ominous:

He's been and gone and left in the "smell of the lavender-scented soap" on the tekkie boy's hands hasn't he?

Here is the Amazon page with a 'look inside' preview, I think every metal detectorist in the land should buy a copy to see how the issues are presented.

Here's a blog post about it.