Tim Willocks

It seemed appropriate to be reading Tim Willocks book "The Religion" in armour. This rattling good story is set in a very interesting period of Maltese history. It covers the Great Seige pretty thouroughly, and the back story is really well researched and solid.
I think the name "The Religion" might put people off...they may think it is about St. Thomas or some such person, rather than the lead character, who is about as different from the Gentle Thomas Aquinas as it is possible to get. This guy has a personal grudge against the Inquisition, and somehow stays alive to continue fighting it! He provides a very nice, three dimentional character with his own story, the result is excellent continuity through a very difficult and confusing battle.
I am glad to see a slightly different take on this famous battle than the usual military thinking....this was actually a grudge match against the moderate Islamic Ottoman Empire against some fanatical elements of the RC church. The Grand Harbour was held in an iron grip by the Knights of St. John, the last of the great "church militant" orders created by and for the crusades working more or less closely with the Spanish Inquisition, and though there were many better targets for Ottoman expansion, this one was a particularly tasty nut to crack.
As hard as Willocks tries to make his characters fully three dimentional, they keep getting upstaged by the fight that is going on all around them. The old emotional baggage between La Valette and the Inquisition which once excommunicated and jailed him might have provided fodder, but come to think of it, would have required a whole 'nother book! As well, the dealings with Dragut the old Barbary pirate, who had captured Vallette when he was young, only to have Vallette return the favor several years later after the a prisoner exchange could have been developed further, as a spice to Dragut's eventual death by sheer accident (if you can call being killed in an artillery barrage an accident!) during Dragut's assault on Fort St. Elmo.
And the fight! Oh my! What a battle! Willocks spares us no details of a horrid bloody desperate fight, his descriptions make us feel like we are actually THERE. He intentionally keeps the fog of war floating across the battle field, and that only adds to the realism. It is very rare in military battles to find units which literally did "fight to the death", but this is one case where it did happen, by men who were well trained, well fed, and sustained in their efforts by "The Religion".