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Despite my snide opening, I really did enjoy Stormbird, the first book in Conn Iggulden’s Wars of the Roses series. Well enough, in fact, that I was eager to order up the second book in the series. That book is called Trinity… or so I thought.

When I tried to order the book on Amazon, I found it was either really expensive or well-used. This struck me as rather strange. The book was published in 2015 and the cover claims it was a Sunday Times bestseller. For it to already be out of print, especially after I was just sold the first book of the series, seems rather strange. Yet, as I’ve said many times before, I don’t understand this industry. Maybe being a best seller via the Sunday Times doesn’t carry that much weight here, across the pond. I don’t even know what it means in England. I tried various on-line bookstores and really got the impression that I was dealing with some kind of rare book. The prices were high across the board, including the used books which were still in reasonably good condition.

Shortly thereafter I had a rather sorry mix-up involving Amazon credits. I’ll not bore you with those details except to say that it got me searching through the catalog of ebooks trying to find a bargain. Naturally, I looked again for Trinity, as the ebook format is supported for some hard-to-find print titles. Thing is, I had also forgotten that name for the 2nd book in the Wars of the Roses series – so I searched for it using those terms. Guess what I turned up?

The name of the book has apparently been changed. The book now is sold as Margaret of Anjou, or Wars of the Roses: Margaret of Anjou if you prefer. It is readily available in multiple formats on Amazon. I’ve not read anywhere why the book needed to be renamed. I’m going to assume its an American market thing. Both Trinity and Margaret of Anjou are rather generic and so copyright issues would not be surprising.

So now I have my book. Oddly, given some of this run-up, it arrived with the cover damaged – leaving me having, in the end, paid full price for a “slightly used” copy. It looks like someone cut through the front cover with a box cutter, possibly while repackaging for shipping. This hasn’t happened with an Amazon order for me before and its not really worth it to me to send the book back for a pristine copy. I generally don’t consider my books collectable and paperbacks tend to get beat up a bit anyway, just through normal use. I’m more interested in how it reads than how it looks.

The second book reads just as good as the first. I have a slight bit of confusion going as the first book in the Philippa Gregory series is still substantially ahead of where I am in the Conn Iggulden series. It’s led to a few moments of, “wait, didn’t I already read about this part?” My own shortcomings aside, though, its an engaging story complete with plausible reconstructions of the personalities of the major nobility.

Hopefully, when it comes time to do so, finding Book 3 will prove an easier endeavor.

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