1635: The Papal Stakes (Ring of Fire Series Book 10);

#15 in the multiple best-selling Ring of Fire Series.

It's springtime in the Eternal City, 1635. But it's no Roman holiday for uptimer Frank Stone and his pregnant downtime wife, Giovanna. They're in the clutches of would be Pope Cardinal Borgia, with the real Pope—Urban VII—on the run with the renegade embassy of uptime Ambassador Sharon Nichols and her swashbuckling downtime husband, Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz. Up to their necks in papal assassins, power politics, murder, and mayhem, the uptimers and their spouses need help and they need it quickly.

Special rescue teams—including Harry Lefferts and his infamous Wrecking Crew—converge on Rome to extract Frank and Gia. And an uptime airplane is on its way to spirit the Pope to safety before Borgia's assassins can find him. It seems that everything is going to work out just fine in sunny Italy.

Until, that is, everything goes wrong. Now, whether they are prisoners in Rome or renegades protecting a pope on the run, it's up to the rough and ready can do attitude of Grantville natives to once again escape the clutches of aristocratic skullduggery and ring in freedom for a war torn land.

At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

Eric Flint is the author of the New York Times best seller 1634: The Galileo Affair (with Andrew Dennis)—a novel in his top-selling "Ring of  Fire" alternate  history series. His first novel for Baen, Mother of Demons, was picked by Science Fiction Chronicle as a best novel of the year. His 1632, which launched the Ring of Fire series, won widespread critical praise, as from Publishers Weekly, which called him "an SF author of particular note, one who can entertain and edify in equal, and major measure." A longtime labor union activist with a master's degree in history, he currently resides in northwest Indiana with his wife Lucille.