“Intrigue”

I tripped over this word, intrigue, the other day.

Maybe this is just because I’m a word guy. I love to play Scrabble, for crying out loud. I wake up at 5 am to obsess over the words I’m writing in my books.

For whatever reason, I stumbled on the word intrigue.

At the time, I was wrestling with how to describe my books. As an author, it’s important to identify your genre. Is this a mystery? An adventure? I know the body counts in my books aren’t high enough to call them thrillers. And I resonate with the lady in Washburn last weekend who said, “I don’t like books that give me nightmares.”

But it’s only fair that as an author, you need to be able to tell people what kind of a book this is. Seems like I’ve struggled to do this with all my books. Is Altered Vows really a fantasy? There are no magic rings in it. The magic that is present in the book is dark sorcery, and it’s more like spiritual manipulation than wizardry in the classic sense. The only dragon that shows up in the story is a demonic power that lives in the rocks under a hot springs, and reveals himself visually, once, as a dragon.

So it’s not Lord of the Rings by any stretch.

I played with the term “low fantasy” for a while. That means it’s more about how people live every day, rather than focusing on the royal courts and princely lineages like so many fantasy novels do. But most people aren’t far enough down the rabbit hole that they know the difference between low and high fantasy, so that’s not helpful either.

Then I tripped across this word, intrigue. Classic definition of intrigue is “to make secret plans to do something illicit or detrimental.” But the word can also mean “to arouse one’s curiosity, to fascinate.”

I’ve decided that Altered Vows is a medieval intrigue. There are wheels within wheels, plots within plots, in this book. The villain of the piece has been twisted by his own vow to forego power for the sake of service. He’s become power obsessed, and he is removing the obstacles that stand in the way of taking power—king, prince, bishop, and more. He pulls people into his power-obsession who seek their own advantage, and he manipulates them toward his goals.

One minor obstacle that he brushes aside without much thought is a young priest. One false accusation, one reassignment that ruins a career, and the priest is out of the way. That priest, Mishal, becomes the fulcrum on which the book turns.

Because God is not above a little intrigue on his own. Like so often happens in real life, God is working behind the scenes, in the shadows of evil plots, to defeat the powers that seek their own advancement at the expense of others.

Mishal, the priest, nearly dies when he is exiled to a remote shrine. But it is there he meets a mentor who saves his life and transforms his calling.

It’s an intrigue. My hope is that this story will arouse the fascination of readers. That way by the time I finish writing the next book later this year, some folks will be intrigued along with me.

You can read Altered Vows free on Kindle Unlimited, or you can buy a paperback copy here on my website or wherever you get books.