Hood: A Guy of Gisburne Novel Toby Venables 9781781085172

The vendetta with Robin Hood has cost too much: blood shed, lives lost, friendships severed.

Guy of Gisburne, knight and agent of the crown, has had enough, and wishes to enjoy a little quiet on his own land. But Hood grows ever more troublesome, and if the barons of the North will not convince Guy to resume the hunt - nor even the rightful King Richard, returned from long imprisonment - then perhaps the simple plea of a missing daughter's father, and a promise to restore a good man's name, will. Hood has gathered an army: the insidious Friar Took, the giant John Lyttel, the cutthroat Scarlet Will, the brilliant and unhinged Alan O'Doyle, among others. Guy will need an army of his own: the redoubtable de Rosseley, the deadly Lady Melisande, the resourceful Asif ibn Salah, even Guy's former enemy, the ferocious Tancred... and his old friend and squire, Galfrid.

The stage is set: Sherwood, long a home to both men. The final confrontation begins...

Toby Venables is a novelist, screenwriter and lecturer in Film Studies at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. He grew up watching old Universal horror movies when his parents thought he was asleep, reading 2000 AD and obsessing about Beowulf. There was probably a bit more to it, but he can't quite remember what it was.

He has since worked as a journalist and magazine editor - launching magazines in Cambridge, Peterborough, Oxford and Bristol - and once orchestrated an elaborate Halloween hoax for which he built and photographed a werewolf. He still works as a freelance copywriter, has been the recipient of a radio advertising award, and in 2001 won the Keats-Shelley Memorial Prize (both possibly due to typing errors).

His first novel (for Abaddon) was The Viking Dead - a historical-zombie-SF mashup which has been described as "A fantastic mix of history, violence and horror" and "ludicrous fun."