I think the reason I liked the book so much was the way the Byzantine ruler Justinian was portrayed in the story. Unlike how the present media portrays events and people, everything in life is not simply black and white. People are complex and fascinating both in good and bad ways, and so is life.

I loved this book because with every chapter I experienced different feelings towards Justinian. I think he was a lot like most of us—He tries to go through life and do the best he can with what he has. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t but no matter whether Justinian was on the top of the world or at the bottom, he lived his life with a great passion and a love of just existing.

Do you have a website/blog where readers may learn more about you and your work? www.jrclifford.com

Do you have another novel on the works? Would you like to tell readers about your current or future projects?

Double Daggers is my second novel and I just finished a new one that I am excited about.
The story is about what happens when a successful family man who has more cracks underneath his surface than a shattered mirror collides with a Cherokee curse, a fortune in gold coins stolen before the Civil War and the discovery of his family’s darkest secrets — Ten Days to Madness.

The book is set over ten days and like Double Daggers it is a work of fiction with a numismatic element to it. In Ten Days to Madness the chief character discovers a diary written by one of his ancestor and the diary makes him obsessed with finding an ancient burial cave in the Appalachian Mountains that, according to his ancestor, contains a fortune in Bechtler gold coins.

The Bechtler coins really existed and they were produced at a mint in Rutherfordton, North Carolina during the mid-1800s.