Those who had a strong enough stomach to read and enjoy Tim Willocks’s Green River Rising will need an even more sustaining digestion to devour The Religion. It must be the author’s initial calling as a medical student that has enlarged his imagination to encompass the grisly horrors of dismemberment and dissection. 

His novel is set in the mid sixteenth century, when Islam was advancing on Christendom and laid siege to Malta. The Knights of St John, the Templar Knights, healers and warriors of the true Church, self-styled as The Religion, are defending the island fortress against the incursion of