Historical thriller, parallel novel to Dumas' Three Musketeers: hunchback Louis d'Astarac, to cure himself and win his lady, seeks the alchemical magic secrets of a lost Rosicrucian book, competing with Cardinal Richelieu, the Jesuits, English agents, and heretical cultists, while crossing paths time and again with d'Artagnan and the musketeers. Swashbuckling historical thriller, a parallel novel to Dumas's The Three Musketeers: In 1619 the esoteric and forbidden magic of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood was compiled into a single volume, The Three Mystic Heirs, a book furiously destroyed by the Inquisition-except for one copy! And Louis d'Astarac thinks he knows how to find it. Louis is a young French noble, witty, cultured, and trained in all the social graces of a 17th century courtier. But he's also a hunchback, stunted and deformed. Rejected by his lady-love Isabeau, Louis, desperate, can see only one way to win her hand: cure his condition by using the secrets of spiritual alchemy hidden in The Three Mystic Heirs. The trail of the lost volume leads Louis to Paris, where he finds a friend in a young scholar named René Descartes-and an encounter with bloody murder. For the power of the Rosicrucian secrets is said to be great beyond measure, and the high and the mighty of Europe are after it as well. Louis becomes a player in a fast-moving game between agents of England's Duke of Buckingham, France's Cardinal Richelieu, the Jesuit Order of Rome ... and the shadowy Rosicrucians themselves. And who is this noisy swordsman d'Artagnan, with his cronies the Three Musketeers, who keeps popping up at every turn? The Rose Knight's Crucifixion, a Novel of Historical Adventure and a Romance of Ideas, Perversely Contiguous to Dumas's The Three Musketeers, Volume Two: The Three Monks of Tears: magic, romance, and adventure await!