Yet despite this, Mosse still sees fit to skip forward some 2 or 3 years in the middle of the novel and ask us to believe that very little of significance occurred in this time, despite the plethora of events that occurred in the times before and after.

Twisted facts entirely for her own purposes and played God with history to such an extent that nothing can be said to be even vaguely based on what was really occurring during this epoch.I was amazed by the writing, by the story and how Mosse manages to captivate the reader with her complex plots and engaging characters.

Even though it is very heavy and hard to hold while reading in bed, ‘Citadel’ was a swift and pleasurable read. I enjoyed Labyrinth and Sepulchre enormously and was overjoyed when I heard Kate had written the final book in the Languedoc trilogy (after the disappointment of the dreadful Winter Ghosts) and was expecting this to be more on the lines of the previous two books, namely the supernatural elements, but this is nothing like the other two at all. From then on I found the novel more interesting, but was still not completely drawn in until the very end, several chapters before the Epilogue, when I could not put the book down until I discovered how to characters' stories would end. It seems too many authors are offered the promise of future publication based on the success of one novel. Ultimately, I was puzzled over the entire point of the story as the ending felt very much 'let's just wrap this up' which is sad.It's not that Kate Mosse does anything badly in this book, she just doesn't do anything well enough to keep me involved. Combining the rugged action of LABYRINTH with the haunting mystery of SEPULCHRE, CITADEL is a story of daring and courage, of lives risked for beliefs and of astonishing secrets buried in time. As usual, we have strong women at the centre of the novel, in both time periods, and the men who love and honour those women. Meanwhile, the Resistance knows where the real Codex lies, but are too busy with pamphleteering to go and get it despite its potential to save their country.

As in the first two books, Mosse sets up two narrative threads progressing in parallel, though the difference here is that neither concerns the present day. As the war reaches its violent and bloody conclusion, Sandrine's fate is tied up with that of three very different men.However, with this second narrative thread, Kate Mosse is able to have the same twist of the supernatural that worked so well in her earlier two books, plus tie all three books together at the climax.