The Crimson Throne (Book Four of Empires of Bronze) by Gordon Doherty

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

The Crimson Throne is the most recent volume of Empires of Bronze, Gordon Doherty’s ongoing historical fiction series set in the ancient Hittite Empire. In this volume, Mr. Doherty continues to weave a superb action-adventure story out of the scraps and tatters of documentary evidence from the period.

The Crimson Throne continues to follow Prince Hattu, a member of the Hittite royal house. After his victories over the Egyptians during the Kadesh campaign, Hattu returned to his homeland to find that his brother had died under mysterious circumstances, and his brother’s son had taken the throne. He soon learned that the new king, called here by his original name of Urhi-Teshub, was responsible for his own father’s death.

Prince Hattu despises his nephew for his treachery, but the young king has many allies, and he holds Hattu’s beloved wife and son as hostages. Hattu therefore tries to remain a loyal servant of the Hittite throne. At the beginning of The Crimson Throne, he has been sent as a diplomatic envoy to the court of King Priam of Troy. Later, he returns to the Hittite capital, only to be confronted with his nephew’s corruption and misrule. Soon enough, he begins to consider rebellion – but the path to the Hittite throne will not be an easy one for the war-weary prince.

Mr. Doherty continues to do a fine job of working with the original sources. Students of Hittite history will recognize many of the references here. Prince Hattu, his wife Puduhepa, Urhi-Teshub, a renegade named Piya-maradu, all of these are well-known in what few documents we have from the time. Troy is also becoming central to the plot of the series, and here the story draws from the familiar Greek myths. I can attest that pulling all of these disparate threads of history and myth together into a coherent narrative is a challenge, one that Mr. Doherty meets with aplomb.

In this volume, the plot continues to be tight and plausible – the minor stumbles in the plot of the first two volumes of the series are no longer visible here. There’s not a lot of moral ambiguity in this blood-and-guts story. I found myself rooting for Prince Hattu as he struggled his way through danger and hardship, and hissing at the malevolence of the villains. As I’ve come to expect from this series, the prose style is clean, with very few copy-editing errors.

Readers should be aware, of course, that the story is set in a brutal and violent time. Descriptions of human cruelty and violence are common and very explicit.

I very much enjoyed The Crimson Thone and am looking forward to the next books in the series – especially now that the Greek heroic age is being woven into the plot in some detail! Strongly recommended, as an action-packed story of treachery and rebellion set in ancient times.