In The Shadow of Lions by Ginger Garrett

Today we're touring In The Shadow of Lions by Ginger Garrett.

Ginger Garrett is a recognized expert in ancient women’s history, having received much critical acclaim for Chosen: The Lost Diaries of Queen Esther and Dark Hour.

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Yet Garrett has now turned her attention from biblical women to that ill-reputed, oft-hated woman of history, Anne Boleyn.

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And the story Garrett weaves is anything but the story you’d expect.

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What if Anne was simply a frightened girl sent to make amends for her family’s soiled name? What if her refusal to succumb to the king’s sexual advances wasn’t borne of manipulation for the crown but of obedience to the demands of her faith?

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Remember, Anne was an enemy to the religious establishment of her time, espousing the virtue of reading the scriptures for oneself rather than paying the priests of the Catholic church for Biblical counsel and absolution.

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Was her staunch belief in the personal relationship with God instead of The Church the reason history has painted her with such a broad, evil stroke?

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Garrett believes this is the case. “One worry that did stay with me during the writing of the novel was that Anne Boleyn’s story has become familiar to many readers. What encouraged me to push through, however, was all the research that told me the other versions had her quite wrong. They paint her as a scheming seductress, a master manipulator...but her crime, as they
put it, was ‘manipulating’ Henry by refusing to sleep with him until she was his wife...It might just prove she took her Christianity more seriously than anyone else in that age.”

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At a time when people were scourged, beaten, and burned at the stake for being caught with a personal copy of the Bible, Anne Boleyn brought one into the royal chambers and dared to tell the King to read it as well.

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This September, readers just might see that Ginger Garrett has finally shown a light on the true
Anne Boleyn, a woman of staunch faith and searching soul.

Book Details
Book: In the Shadow of Lions

Author: Ginger Garrett

Published: September 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7814-4887-1

Price: $13.99

Publisher: David C. Cook

About the Author

Ginger Garrett is an expert in ancient women’s history and the author of several critically acclaimed books. Ginger’s first novel, Chosen: The Lost Diaries of Queen Esther, was a finalist for the Christian Book Award, recognizing it as one of the top five inspirational novels for 2006. Ginger was also nominated for the Georgia Author of the Year Award for her novel Dark Hour.

Her nonfiction Beauty Secrets of the Bible reveals how biblical women viewed beauty and the natural foods, perfumes and cosmetics that complemented their spiritual beauty.

In the fall of 2008, Ginger will release In the Shadow of Lions, the first of a three-part fiction series fro David C. Cook. In the Shadow of Lions focuses on the untold story of Anne Boleyn and how guardian angels may help shape human history.

Ginger is a popular speaker at women’s events, and a frequent radio and television guest. Ginger Garrett has been interviewed by media across the country including Fox News, The New York Times, FamilyNet Television, National Public Radio, Billy Graham’s Hour of Decision, Harvest Television, and more.

the above Press Material is provided by Glass Road Public Relations, LLC
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here are some awesome videos the author herself posted on youtube

How to Give a Medival Feast

and In the Shadow of Lions

if you want a tasty of this book here's the first chapter!

And Job said unto God:

I admit I once lived by rumors of you;

now I have it all firsthand…

I’ll never again live

on crusts of hearsay, crumbs of rumor.

Job 42, The Message



CHAPTER ONE


Tomorrow, someone else will die in my bed.

Someone died in it last month, which is how it came to be called mine.

The infernal clock moved confidently towards 1 a.m., and I turned my head to look at the window. The window of this room is a miserly gesture from the contractors, producing more fog than visage. I watched the gold orbs—the lamps on the lawn of the hospice sputtering off and on in the darkness—that dotted the fogged glass.

That was the last moment I lived as an iver, one whose eyes are veiled.

One orb did not sputter but moved, gliding between the others, moving closer to the window, growing larger and brighter until the light consumed the entire view. I winced from the searing glare and tried to shield my eyes, but the IV line pulled taut. Wrestling with the line to get some slack, I saw the next movement out of the corner of my eye. I bit down hard on my tongue, my body jerking in reflex, and felt the warm blood run back to my throat.

Outside, a hand wiped the fog away from the glass, and I watched the water beads running down the inside of my window. There was no searing light, only this mammoth hand with deep creases in the palms wiping down the window until we both could see each other. A man’s face was against the glass, but no breath fogged his vision. He was a giant, grim man, with an earring in one ear and dark glasses, and he was staring in at me. Even through the morphine, fear snaked along my arms, biting into my stomach, constricting around my throat. I tried to scream, but I could only gulp air and heave little gasps. His expression did not change as he lifted his hands, curling them into fists. I flinched at the last moment, thinking him to be Death, expecting to receive the blow and die.

Then I grew suddenly warm, like the feeling you get stepping out from an old, dark city library into the busy street and a warm spring sun.

Death didn’t even hurt, I rejoiced. I could slip into it like I slipped onto that street, eyes down, my thoughts my own, and simply turn a corner and be gone. I lifted my fingers to beckon him. Yes, I thought. I saw the beautiful Rolex on my birdlike wrist, and saw that it had stopped. It is time.

When I looked back up, he was beside me, staring down, not speaking. I wasn’t dead. His frame was monstrously large, hitting what must be seven feet tall, with a width of muscle strapped across it that was inhuman. As he watched me, his chest didn’t move, and his nostrils didn’t flare, but heat and warm breath radiated from him. When he laid his hands across my eyes, I was too scared to move my head away. His palms covered most of my face, and a sharp buzzing drilled into every pore. He began to move his hands elsewhere, touching and bringing to life every splintered inch of my body. When he got to the cancer, with one swollen lymph node visible even through my stained blue gown, he rested his hands there until the swelling sighed and he swept it away with his hand.

“Wait!” I screamed.

I didn’t want to live. I hadn’t known that was going to be an option. I deserved to be damned. To return to my life was too much to ask of me. I was finished.

“You’ll still be dead by morning,” he reassured me. His voice was deep and clean, no tell-tale dialect or inflection. Taking off his glasses, I saw he had enormous gold eyes, with a black pinhole in the center that stayed round and cold. There was no white in them at all, and they were rimmed all the way around the outside with black. I stared at them, trying to remember where I had seen eyes like this. It was years ago, this much I remembered.

I had to shake myself back to the moment. Clearly, morphine was not setting well with me tonight. I wanted to die in peace. That’s what I paid these extravagant sums for. My hand moved to the nurses’ call button. Mariskka was just down the hall, waiting for her moment to steal my watch. I knew she’d come running.

He grabbed my hand and the shock seared like a hot iron. Crying out, I shook him off and clutched my hand between my breasts, doing my best to sit up with my atrophied stomach muscles and tangled IV.

He leaned in. “I have something for you.”

“What?”

He leaned in closer. “A second chance.”

Second chances were not my forte. As the most celebrated editor in New York City, I had made a killing. I loved the words that trembling writers slid across my desk, those little black flecks that could destroy their life’s dream or launch a career. I bled red ink over every page, slashing words, cutting lines. No one understood how beautiful they were to me, why I tormented the best writers, always pushing them to bring me more. The crueler I was to the best of them, the more they loved me, like flagellants worshipping me as the master of their order. Only at the end, lying here facing my own death, did I understand why. They embraced the pain, thinking it birthed something greater than themselves. I saw how pitifully wrong they were. There was only pain. This is why I was ready to die. When you finish the last chapter and close the book, there is nothing but pain. It would have been better never to have written. Words betrayed me. And for that, I betrayed the best writer of them all.

“Burn any manuscripts that arrive for me,” I had ordered my nurse, Marisska. “Tell them I’m already dead. Tell them anything.”

“I’ll let you write the truth,” the man whispered.

“I’m not a writer,” I replied. My fear tumbled down into the dark place of my secrets.

“No, you’re not,” he answered. “But you’ve coveted those bestsellers, didn’t you? You knew you could do better. This is your second chance.”

It caught my attention. “How?”

“I will dictate my story to you,” he said. “Then you’ll die.”

Taking dictation? My mouth fell open. “I’m in hell, aren’t I?”

He tilted his head. “Not yet.”

I pushed away from the pillows and grabbed him. Blisters sprang up on my palms and in between my fingers, but I gritted my teeth and spat out my words. “Who are you?”

“The first writer, the Scribe. My books lie open before the Throne and someday will be the only witness of your people and their time in this world. The stories are forgotten here and the Day draws close. I will tell you one of my stories. You will record it.”

“Why me?”

“I like your work.”

I started laughing, the first time I had laughed since I had been brought to this wing of the hospice, where the dying are readied for death, their papers ordered, and discreet pamphlets on “end of life options” left by quiet-soled salesmen. I laughed until I was winded. He rested his hand on my chest, and I caught my breath as he spoke.

“Let’s go find Marisska.”