S W O'Connell

Envoy of the Lord S W O'Connell

1959: Sputnik circles the earth and the Cold War turns dark. Mattheus Melchior, a cynical veteran of Hitler's army who moves to Canada to escape war-torn Europe, is recruited by the Canadian Ministry of Defense (MOD) in a scheme to harness the power of the mind to cross time and spy on the Soviets. A team of behavioral scientists and intelligence officers launch Melchior across a millennium and into a world as war-plagued and conflicted as the mid-20th century. Melchior quickly learns that he was, and is, a Missus Dominicus - an envoy of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne and his premier warrior. Charlemagne sends Melchior on a covert mission as harrowing as the one that brought him to the 9th century. He must travel to the eastern frontier to find the queen of a renegade pagan Saxon tribe. He is ordered to convert or kill this queen, who is also a witch! Melchior soon faces a host of enemies: pagan Saxon tribes, savage Asiatic horsemen, treasonous knights, packs of assassins, rogue priests, and heretical bishops. But Melchior's greatest struggle is a conflict of mind and heart. Envoy of the Lord is a Cold War espionage time-travel story set in Canada and Germany during the dark days following the Soviet launch of Sputnik in the 1950s.