Templar’s Acre

by Michael Jecks Book 32 in the Last Templar Mysteries series.

First published 2013

Amazon

4.4(857)

Acre, 1291. The crusader port is the last major mainland stronghold of the Latin East, crowded with soldiers, merchants and refugees as al-Ashraf Khalil’s Mamluk army prepares its assault. A young Baldwin arrives inexperienced and uncertain, before he has become the investigator known in Devon.

The siege forces him to confront murder within the city while its walls are being destroyed from outside. His coming of age is inseparable from the collapse of the Templar world he hoped to join, linking personal faith and first combat with the civilian panic, factional rivalry and mass flight that accompanied Acre’s fall.

Acre’s fall marks the practical end of the major crusader states on the Levantine mainland. The city’s crowded streets contain rival military orders, merchants and refugees whose interests do not always align even as the Mamluk assault approaches. The novel uses the inexperienced Baldwin to show how a supposedly fortified Christian world can collapse when political division and military pressure converge.