Manda Scott.... qualified as a veterinary surgeon from Glasgow University and spent fifteen years in East Anglia working variously as a surgeon, equine neonatologist and anaesthetist before she turned to writing as an alternative, less sleep-deprived profession.
In the beginning, she wrote contemporary crime thrillers. The first, 'Hen's Teeth' (The Women's Press) was short listed for the Orange prize, the third, Stronger than Death (Headline) was awarded an Arts Council of England prize for Literature and her fourth, No Good Deed, was nominated in the 'Best Novel' category of the prestigious Edgar Awards in 2003.
In 2000, Inca, the elder lurcher, killed a lactating hare and the vision quest that grew out of that led to what is now the 'Boudica' series; four novels exploring the life and times of Boudica, the war-leader of the Eceni who lead the revolt against Rome in 61 AD.
Her new thriller - THE CRYSTAL SKULL, was published by Transworld in hardback in the UK on 1st January 2008. It will be released in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Poland, Holland, France, Spain, Hungary, Norway, Thailand, Italy, the Czech Republic, Romania and Latin America later in the year or early in 2009.
From the back cover:
21.12.12
The date is set,
Time is running out
Ancient Wisdom predicts the end of the world with uncanny precision.
But it also provides the key to staving off apocalypse: a flawless sapphire of incomparable beauty carved into the perfect likeness of a human skull.
This is a fast-paced thriller, weaving contemporary and Elizabethan threads. It explores the Mayan prophecy, given in the Dresden Codex, that the end of the fifth age (ours) will take place on 21st December 2012. To give us hope, the Maya carved 13 skulls and sent them around the world. Only when all thirteen are joined together can the Ouroborous, the world snake, Kukulkan, also known as Quetzlcoatl, arise to save the world from oblivion.
A website dedicated to the new novel can be found here: The Crystal Skull
She is currently working on a Roman spy thriller provisionally entitled 'The Great Fire of Rome.'
The fire was lit on 18th July AD64, 3 years after the end of the Boudican revolt. Characters were left in Gaul at the end of Dreaming the Bull with a view to returning to them and to others of the survivors. In researching the nature of the fire, I have come to believe that it was lit deliberately, that it was an effort to fulfill a prophecy which stated that the 'Kingdom of Heaven' could not arise unless Rome had burned in the sight of the Dog Star (Sirius rose over Rome for the first time that year on the night of 18th July) - and that it was lit by Saulos the Herodian, known to us as St Paul.
Paul, in my belief, was a Roman agent tasked with bringing the Hebrews to Rome by peaceful means to avoid the blood bath - and expense of an invasion such as had happened in Britain where the treasury lost 26 million sesterces - an astonishing sum at the time. Having failed by violence, Paul created a god-man after the fashion of Greek and Egyptian gods of the time, fusing the essence of sacrifice with the Hebrew texts in existence at that time.
In doing so, he followed the lead of Ptolemy Soter who had created Serapis by an amalgamation of Osiris, Apis and Dionysus.
Paul evinces no knowledge whatsoever of the man whose death he so floridly usurps. Indeed, if Acts is to be believed at all, Paul was excommunicated from the Hebrew Assembly (probably analogous to the 'Fourth Philosophy' described by Josephus as 'running through the lands of Judea and Galillee in the preceding decades) run by James the Just, brother to the man we know as Christ, and Cephas, whom Paul identifies as Simon-Peter. Efforts were made to assasinate him, such that he had to rely on his Roman allies to escape.
The events of the new book begin thereafter, in 64AD, by which time, such history as we have, has lost sight of him.
The book explores the lives of Paul, Cephas (aka Simon the zealot) and, by inference, the man history came to know as Christ.