Sophie, Jean-Jacques and Christophe form a brilliant, young and fun, passionate love triangle in ENS, the elite college in Paris. Inspired by the liberated and complex affairs of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus a century before. Joyously exploring the City of Light, from Sacre Coeur to the Moulin Rouge, Montparnasse to Notre Dame. Young and confident of their immortal destiny, what can possibly stop these shining stars from changing the world's orbit?

Ten years later, hurt and angry, Sophie returns on a divinely inspired mission to bring down the misogynous elite and take revenge on her lover. He's in the UK now, and her Machiavellian plan unfolds as a remorseless and bloody chess game played out in Winchester, Bath, Southampton, Windsor, Oxford and London, in which the pieces are people of inherited wealth and privilege. Before every move, her opponents are given a chance. Jean-Jacques and his team (and the reader too perhaps) must solve the labyrinthine clues and race against that infernal clock to solve mathematical life and death puzzles, before catastrophe befalls them all.

As the inexorable denouement approaches, two mighty gender-differentiated forces collide in an emotional maelstrom and society trembles on the edge of disaster.

About The Writer

He was born in Waterford, Ireland, and at six weeks of age, demonstrated the benefits of his Viking ancestry by sailing across the Irish Sea, with his family, in a rather unusual engine-driven longboat, to live from thereon in England.

Educated in The London Oratory and Goldsmiths College, London, he completed a Physics PGCE teaching qualification at Southampton University and taught for twenty years in Hampshire schools.

The London Oratory bestowed many formative experiences whose influence might be detected in Pascalene: Macbeth at the Royal Festival Hall with its vindictive, morally ambiguous witches; reading from the Gospel at the magnificent Brompton Oratory Church to my six hundred fellow school members; Stephen Birslan casually sweeping over my chess pieces as he and his posse strolled through the chess club; ducking board rubber and chalk missiles in Mad Jack O'Connell's whisky-fuelled Maths lessons; and last but not least, girls arriving in the sixth form from the convent, miraculously transforming Tarzan-like Viscount Greystokes, to gallant swashbuckling Sir Walter Raleighs. It is of course possible, that time may have magically romanticised my recollections.

His other education involved working, aged 19, as a trainee insurance broker in Piccadilly, before reviewing life and buying a one-way coach ticket to Athens, with five matching, stylish, suitcases, containing an iron and a kettle, and spending three months swimming around the Greek islands. At midnight on the starry night of his twentieth birthday, he ducked under an amazingly low-flying Perseids meteor, thinking, 'I've got to know how all this works!'

After catching a Turkish car ferry to Marseille and promptly having his passport stolen, necessitating a six week stay there, he apple picked with three newly found travel buddies in Aix-en-Provence, fait les vendanges, picked grapes, in Beziers and Carcassonne, before travelling with them to spend the winter in Paris.

Arriving there on the first November, he left the Odeon Metro holding the map upside down whilst searching for their extremely budget hotel and turned the wrong way. He found himself on Pont Saint-Michel, confronted by the stupendous beauty and power of the illuminated Cathedrale Notre-Dame and thinking, 'Incredible! What is this place?'' He lived there, working, studying, discovering, in that City of Light for a year and a half, before following the advice of a retired American ambassador to France, and returning to England to complete his studies.

Thirty odd years later, in a motorhome in Spain, he still carried that sense of life's wonder. Reading about the divine inspiration that led to Blaise Pascal's ingenious invention, he was motivated to write about the wonder of life, and started what eventually became, Pascalene.