Emma Earl, The Heart Of

The Heart of Emma Earl might be appropriate for a romance novel, but it's actually the name of the eighth and final novel in the Tales of the Scarlet Knight series.

In that novel the evil goddess Isis has finally triumphed over the Scarlet Knight and is expanding to bend the world to her will.  Emma's friend Tim Cooper has to travel to another dimension in order to get the weapons they need to free her from Isis.  That's only the beginning of what is an epic story.

The heart of Emma Earl is more than a metaphorical reference.  The actual heart of Emma Earl is the key to defeating Isis.  This is first referenced in the third story, The Hazards of Love, when Isis first appears.  The evil goddess literally consumes the hearts of people to sustain herself.  But when she eats the heart of someone as good and noble as the Scarlet Knight, it gives her a really nasty case of indigestion.

Thus the only way for the Scarlet Knight to defeat Isis is to give her heart to Isis again.  And since people can't live without a heart, it means she would have to die.  Emma does actually die, but of course I cheat on it in such a way that will probably piss people off.

This is the longest book in the series because it's a "kitchen sink" book where I throw all kinds of stuff out there.  We have action in at least three parallel worlds (take that Offutt and your only TWO worlds!) plus the astral plane.  There's a Pegasus, Greek gods, Egyptian goddesses, witches, vampires, mutant rats, robot suits, a cowboy trucker who in the movie version would be played by Sam Elliott, and even people raining from the sky at one point.

It did take a while to figure out how to approach this book because I'd kind of painted myself into a corner when I had Emma, Ms. Chiostro, and Akako all captured by Isis.  Then I remembered a Wingman book I'd read where the first half of the book is some of the secondary characters searching to find the main character.  Or you could think of Star Trek III if you want.  That seemed a good way to do things, so then I only needed to find someone to do the searching and it occurred to me that since he'd gone to prison at the end of book 5, Tim Cooper would be far away from Rampart City.  And it all started snowballing from there.  My philosophy on "last" books is go big or go home, so I pretty much did whatever the hell I wanted.  I'm not sure anyone but me has gotten up to it yet.  Maybe you'll be the first!

This and the rest of my books are available at the new Planet 99 Publishing site!