Cipher Mysteries

Here comes another book to add to my Big Fat List of Voynich novels: the just-about-released-any-day-now The Cadence of Gypsies by Barbara Casey. It has a fairly straightforward setup: On her 18th birthday Carolina Lovel learned that she was adopted and was given a letter written by her birth mother in an unknown language. After years of research she travels ...

OK, moving straight into confessional mode, I feel more than a touch ashamed that I haven't reviewed Chris Harris' Mappamundi loooong before now. But... even though I've read it twice, I still don't really know what to say about it. Let me explain... Sticking to the knitting, it's a fairly trite starting point to note that it's an historical adventure, with ...

Carrying on with (what is rapidly turning into) Cipher Mysteries BookFest '10, I've had Bill Napier's (2003) "Shattered Icon" on my list of Voynich-related novels for simply ages, so a review is somewhat overdue. Napier, a "Scottish astronomer who lives in Ireland and has a professorship in Wales", was so engaged by rumours of a 16th century calendrical plot that he felt ...

In my opinion, cipher mystery-themed airport novels tend (as I wrote here a few days ago) to be written by (1) "Rack Pack" writers, (2) "Domain Experts", or (3) "Wannabe Screenwriters". Having read Steve Berry's book "The Templar Legacy" (2006) as a warm-up, I recently moved on to his "The Charlemagne Pursuit" (2008), where the serial use of the ...

Here's something a bit unexpected: a teen novel built around school rivalries, DNA testing, the Voynich Manuscript and the Phaistos Disc. Due to come out in February 2010, could "That's Life, Samara Brooks" be the first properly crossover Voynich-themed book to add to the Cipher Mysteries Big Fat List? I'll be sure to get a copy along the ...

Having just blogged on up-to-the-minute German Voynichiana, what of the rest of Europe? Here's a quick sampling to whet your appetite, should you ever wish to feast on such morcels... (2008) El castillo de las estrellas Enrique Joven [mentioned here] Having worked with Enrique recently (he generously translated my History Today telescope article so that it could appear in Astronomia magazine), I'm ...

While adding categories to some old blog posts just now, up popped a mention of the Karlsruhe Virtual Katalog (KVK). I normally use KVK to find specific non-fiction holdings: but today I wondered what otherwise-unknown Voynich masterpieces it might be able to tell me about. At Dennis Stallings' prompting, I've just started to add non-English Voynich novels to ...

Wah, looky heyuh - it's another Voynich novel to add to my big fat list. Retired chemical industry R&D / sales guy Baz Cunningham will be signing copies of his third novel "The Voynich Enigma" next Saturday morning (15th Nov 2008) in New Martinsville, WV. In the book, a couple of sharp-witted cousins find the key to the VMs on their ...

In much the same way that the Voynich Manuscript has provided a blank screen for generations of amateur cryptologists to project their code-breaking desires onto, it has in recent years provided a rich loam for writers to plant their novelistic seeds into. In the bad old days of novel-writing, the VMs would simply have been treated as an interchangeable cipher-based ...

Blogger "Frog Princess" spent a Sunday in Oxford taking randomesque pictures of flowers, muffins, shoes and cherry beer (sounds like an OK day to me), while thinking about vampires: her blog entry received a comment by "seraphim_grace" mentioning yet another Voynich book I hadn't heard previously heard of... "Deliver Us From Evil" (2000) by Brit author Tom Holland ...