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Today, I am chatting with Marthese Fenech about Falcon’s Shadow, the second novel in her Siege of Malta trilogy.
Set against the turbulent world of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, Falcon’s Shadow continues the stories begun in Eight Pointed Cross, as familiar characters find themselves facing new dangers far beyond the shores of Malta. With loyalties tested, families divided and the threat of a much greater conflict drawing ever closer, this is a story shaped as much by its characters as by the extraordinary history surrounding them.
Marthese joins us today to talk about returning to Domenicus, Katrina and Demir, the immersive research behind the novel, writing the challenging middle book of a trilogy, and bringing the sixteenth-century Mediterranean vividly to life.
Publication Date: 9th February 2027
The ghosts of war leave no footprints.
When legendary Ottoman seaman Dragut Raïs attacked the Maltese islands in 1551, his army left Gozo a smoking ruin.
Among the five thousand carried into slavery is Augustine Montesa, father of Domenicus and Katrina. Wounded and broken, Dom vows to find him—even if it means abandoning Angelica, his betrothed.
Armed with only a gemstone to serve as ransom, he sets out on a journey that sees him forcibly recruited from the streets of Europe and thrown into the frontline.
On Malta, Kat struggles to find work. When she finally stumbles upon a promising position, all is not as it seems. She must confront a terrible truth—one that may prove disastrous for Robert, the man she loves.
Hundreds of leagues to the east in Istanbul, Demir, son of a wealthy Turkish bey, trains to become an imperial Ottoman horseman, enduring the cruelty of his father and half-brother. His life takes an
unexpected turn when he encounters a young woman stolen from Malta, brought into the household as another of his father’s servants.
The second Siege of Malta novel, Falcon’s Shadow sweeps from quarry pits to sprawling estates, from tumultuous seas to creaking gallows—from the dungeons beneath the bishop’s palace to the open decks
of warships. At the Battle of Djerba, fates will collide, uniting lost kin only to tear them apart once more.
Falcon's Shadow picks up in the aftermath of the devastating events of 1551. How have those experiences changed Domenicus, and what challenges did you face in allowing him to evolve while keeping him recognisably the character readers came to know in Eight Pointed Cross?
Domenicus has been profoundly shaped by the events of 1551. He has experienced loss, violence, betrayal, and uncertainty on a scale that has forced him to grow up very quickly. But I didn't want those experiences to turn him into an entirely different person. The qualities that define him in Eight Pointed Cross, such as his loyalty, determination, courage, and stubbornness, are still very much there. What has changed is his perspective. There is a slight roughening of the edges that comes when reality sloughs away idealism and naivety.
What brings about the biggest transformation is Dom leaving everything he knows and everyone he loves behind—Angelica, his sister Katrina, his best friend Robert, and the island that has always been his entire world. He has never left Malta's shores, yet suddenly he must set out into an unfamiliar world to find his father, with no experience to help prepare him for what lies ahead.
That journey becomes as much about learning what he is capable of as it is about finding Augustine. Dom has to navigate places, people, and dangers he has never encountered before. He must make decisions for himself and live with the consequences—and sometimes those involve bruises or worse. The young man is quicker to question his assumptions now, and he learns that trusting the wrong person can result in something far more serious than hurt feelings. He ends up thrust into situations far beyond his control, his autonomy stripped from him. And he discovers that courage isn't always about being willing to fight. Sometimes it's about continuing forward when frightened, uncertain, and overwhelmed.
The challenge I faced was letting him mature without sanding away the qualities that made readers care about him in the first place. He is older and harder now, but he is still Dom.
Domenicus is driven by the need to rescue his father, giving the wider conflict an intensely personal dimension. How does that determination influence the choices he makes throughout the novel?
His determination to find his father drives much of Falcon's Shadow. He is willing to take enormous risks because the possibility of losing Augustine is something he cannot accept. That single-minded purpose makes him courageous and resourceful, but it can also impede his ability to think rationally, as tends to happen when a loved one is in danger.
Even the title has a double meaning. Falcon's Shadow is the name of the ship that carries Domenicus to North Africa following a fateful encounter. But more than that, the falcon is a metaphor for Augustine. He is strong, independent, focused, and difficult to deter once he has set his mind on something. But the “shadow” also represents the influence he has cast over Dom's life. Even when they are separated by vast distance, Augustine remains a powerful presence in his son's world and that is part of what ultimately drives Dom to leave Malta and set out for Istanbul.
Throughout the novel, that same determination pushes him into situations that become increasingly dangerous. He is robbed, beaten, press-ganged, and shoved into a position where the lives of younger boys depend on him. Survival itself becomes a daily concern, and Dom has to find reserves of courage and resilience he didn't know he possessed. His choices aren't always the safest or most sensible ones, but they are consistently driven by integrity and a sense of duty. Dom cannot walk away when someone else needs him.
There is also a deeply personal element to this storyline for me. I have always seen part of my own dad in Augustine. He was a quiet, dignified man who never boasted about his accomplishments, but who was immensely proud of his children. I lost my dad suddenly while I was preparing the Siege of Malta trilogy for rerelease, and that loss gave me a deeper appreciation of Augustine's relationship with his children.
Domenicus Montesa's journey was written long before my father passed, but working on the trilogy again afterwards gave it a new emotional layer, and has pushed me to continue working on the prequel. I understood in a very different way what it means to desperately want more time with someone. I think that made Dom's determination to reach his father feel even more vital to me.
Katrina has already endured considerable upheaval by the time we reach this second instalment. How does her role develop in Falcon's Shadow, and what did you particularly want to explore through her continuing story?
With Katrina, I wanted to explore the difference between courage and recklessness. Kat is brave, fiercely protective, and prepared to act when other people might hesitate. Those are qualities I admire in her. But her impetuousness can also get her—and the people around her—into serious trouble.
In Eight Pointed Cross, teenage Kat steps in to defend Robert against his drunken employer. Though her instinct is to protect someone she cares about, the consequences are much larger than she anticipates. The farmer reports Robert to the authorities, and Robert ends up incarcerated. Katrina's actions also affect Robert's mother, her own father, and the people who have to travel to Mdina to defend Robert. She has lied to her father, and as a result, a man who has always trusted her loses faith in her judgment and forbids her from attending the town's much-anticipated annual festivities.
What matters to Kat is that she meant to help. But she has to face the fact that good intentions don't necessarily protect her loved ones from consequences, a hard lesson she carries with her into Falcon's Shadow.
In the second book, Kat has to learn patience. She needs to think before she acts and understand that sometimes the bravest thing she can do is stop, assess the situation, and wait. Her actions don't only affect her, and learning that is part of her growth.
I also wanted her to discover that being capable doesn't mean she has to do everything herself. She takes on work in a butcher shop, and when Robert questions whether she's ready to handle dangerous instruments, her answer is essentially, “I will learn.” That's Kat in a nutshell. She may not know how to do something yet, but she's quite sure she'll figure it out.
What I didn't want was to make her less fierce. She simply has to learn where that strength is useful—and where it might blow up her whole world.
Demir's journey also develops considerably as the trilogy progresses. Without giving too much away, how does Falcon's Shadow challenge his loyalties and his understanding of the world around him?
Demir is probably the character whose world changes most dramatically in this series. He has been raised with very particular ideas about loyalty, honour, service, and what is expected of him. He also genuinely loves his culture and takes great pride in serving the Ottoman Empire. He spends time around influential people, including men like Dragut Raïs, and he has grown up aspiring to serve the Sultan and the Empire as an imperial horseman. Then he begins discovering that the world isn't nearly as straightforward as he thought.
And there is another, more personal, complication. Demir has grown up under a father who is brutal and cruel, with a half-brother whose treatment of him is no less vicious. Life within his own family has taught him to endure rather than question, and for much of his life, he has had very little control over his own circumstances. That makes his eventual questioning of those loyalties all the more difficult.
One of the biggest revelations is learning that his mother was born Maltese and Christian. Suddenly, there are pieces of his own history that he never knew existed. Now, he doesn’t seem to fit in his own life. That forces him to question not only his family, but where he himself belongs.
He also befriends Augustine, Dom and Kat's father, who arrives in his household as a new slave. That friendship forces Demir to confront some very uncomfortable contradictions in the world he has been taught to accept. He has grown up believing slavery is part of the natural order of things. But Demir gets to know Augustine as a person. He comes to respect him and care about him, and that makes it much harder for Demir to accept that being enslaved somehow makes Augustine less of a person.
At the same time, Demir is maturing. He becomes more independent, makes friends of his own, and starts thinking less about who other people expect him to be and more about who he actually wants to become.
And then he falls in love for the first time. His feelings for Fariha are genuine, but her position within his father's household makes that love incredibly dangerous. Demir knows exactly what is at stake, yet he can't walk away from her. He begins looking for a way to give her freedom, even though doing so could put both of them—and Demir’s beloved mother—in great peril.
For Demir, growing up means realising that loyalty isn't always as simple as obedience. He has to decide for himself what and whom he is willing to stand for.
One of the strengths of the series is that the Mediterranean conflict is experienced through characters on different sides. Does allowing readers to become emotionally invested in people whose loyalties oppose one another help you explore the human complexity behind the history?
Absolutely. In fact, it's one of the reasons I wanted to tell this story in the way I did.
History can make enormous conflicts look very clean on the page: one side against another, one army fighting another, one political power opposing another. But people don't experience history that way. And everyone believes they are on the right side. The more I researched this period, the more I realised how impossible it was to reduce it to a battle between good and evil. Very few things are that binary.
I want readers to care about people on opposing sides of the conflict. I'm not interested in dividing the characters into heroes and villains based on geography or which banner they serve.
In Falcon's Shadow, those boundaries become even more complicated as characters who seem to have little in common discover unexpected connections. Demir's relationship with Augustine is one example. Domenicus and Almahdi’s alliance is another. In both cases, they come from completely different worlds, yet they find friendship and mutual respect. People can be enemies politically and still recognise kindness, courage, or humanity in one another.
The novel moves through locations including Malta, Istanbul, Djerba and Italy, creating a wonderfully expansive Mediterranean setting. What did each of these places allow you to bring to the story in terms of atmosphere, culture and historical context?
Each place has its own personality, and I wanted the characters to experience that rather than merely moving through a series of fascinating historical settings like they were writing reviews for Trip Advisor.
Malta is a world of stone, fortifications, heat, and exposure. Its geography is inseparable from its history, and the island's strategic importance is something the characters (and visitors!) constantly feel. It is also deeply personal territory for me. Malta is my second home, and travelling there frequently and extensively allowed me to experience the landscape in ways that studying maps and textbooks never could. Maltese people are passionate, loud, vibrant, and resilient. It was really important to me to capture that spirit in a way that Maltese readers would recognise and hopefully approve of.
I was twenty-five when I visited Istanbul for research, and it really opened up the world for me. Istanbul is a living museum, an enormous, cosmopolitan imperial capital. I wanted to capture that sense of scale, wealth, power, and cultural diversity. Beyond those details, I wanted to truly get a sense of its atmosphere, all the sensory details that make a place unmistakable. So much of what I experienced in that incredible city made its way into my novels—from kittens working together to steal a rotisserie chicken to the magical, ethereal expanse of the Underground Cistern.
North Africa gave me another opportunity to explore a different part of the Mediterranean and to move beyond the idea that the region was one uniform culture. Also, the Arabic spoken in Morocco has strong similarities to Maltese, so I was able to understand conversations and even communicate with locals. It made bartering much more fun and lively, and it also informed scenes involving Moroccan and Maltese characters conversing with each other. That allowed me to show just how interconnected yet diverse the Mediterranean world was.
Italy was particularly important because several of my characters are Florentine. I wanted to see where they came from and understand the places that had shaped them. What surprised me was how much I came to understand about architecture and emotion, and how the two interact and influence our behaviour.
Food can become a character in its own right. While visiting Pompeii, I bought an orange grown in volcanic soil that was practically the size of a soccer ball. It kept me full for an entire day. So naturally, when my characters find themselves in Italy, they get to sustain themselves on giant volcanic-soil oranges. Nothing is off limits.
That's really what my research is about. I don't just want to know what a place looked like. I want to know what it smelled like, what locals discussed, how they swore, what sounds echoed within a village, how the heat felt, how people travelled, and what their beds were made of. Those are the details that make a place feel authentic.
Captivity, slavery and displacement were harsh realities of sixteenth-century Mediterranean warfare. How did you approach researching and portraying these subjects while keeping the individual experiences of your characters at the forefront?
I think the first responsibility is not to allow historical suffering to become ornamentation. Captivity, slavery, and displacement were realities of the period, but they are not abstract historical concepts. They meant (and in many parts of the world, still mean) losing freedom, being separated from loved ones, being deprived of choices, and enduring violence and degradation.
So although I needed to understand the historical reality through research, primary sources, and specific context, I always came back to the individual character. What does this experience mean to this person? What are they afraid of? What do they miss? What are they trying to hold on to? How do they find joy? How do they resist, even in small acts?
Augustine's captivity, for example, isn't simply there to demonstrate that slavery existed. His displacement is tied to his memories of Malta, his longing for his family, and the friendships he forms in captivity. His relationship with Kemal becomes particularly important to him, as does his work with the horses. Those things give him pieces of himself to hold on to when so much has been taken away.
I also didn't want to sanitise the realities of the period because they are difficult to read about. At the same time, I don't believe suffering has to be made graphic to make it meaningful. If anything, gratuitous violence risks stripping away the person's humanity for the sake of spectacle.
Honouring the experience of enslaved people in writing requires balancing historical truth with emotional responsibility. My goal in portraying this aspect of history was to centre the full humanity of the individuals rather than the institution of slavery.
A second novel in a trilogy has the difficult task of continuing established storylines while also moving everything towards the final instalment. Did you find writing the middle book presented different structural challenges from writing Eight Pointed Cross?
Yes. Writer's block from hell.
Eight Pointed Cross had the advantage of being the first book. I was introducing the world, establishing the characters, and setting overarching conflicts in motion. As such, I mistakenly thought writing the sequel would be easier. With Falcon's Shadow, everything was already moving. I had a whole collection of characters who apparently expected me to know what they were doing next.
I thought I did. But I didn’t.
My husband and I had temporarily relocated to Singapore, which seemed like the perfect environment for writing: time, freedom, tropical surroundings, and seemingly endless inspiration. Instead, I couldn't write a damn thing. I started wondering whether my characters had anything left to say—or worse, whether I even cared anymore.
Then, one afternoon, I was sitting at an outdoor café with a hopelessly blank notebook when the scent of frangipani drifted over from nearby trees. That scent sparked a scene. The scene sparked dialogue. The dialogue sparked a plot. Suddenly, the fog lifted. I was so grateful that I adopted a frangipani tree in Malaysia in thanks.
The structural challenge was still there, though. The middle of a trilogy is tricky. I couldn’t just escalate everything from the first book, because eventually, there’d be nowhere left to go. I knew I needed to deepen the characters and the conflict while still keeping the story moving and preparing the plot and the characters for the final instalment. I found that much harder than I expected. But once I stopped trying to force the book to behave and let the characters take me where they needed to go, it started to come together.
I need to remind myself of that as I work on the series prequel.
Falcon's Shadow contains large-scale historical events alongside intimate relationships and fast-paced action. How do you prevent the weight of historical research from slowing the story when your characters are caught in moments of immediate danger?
I want the history to be experienced rather than explained. If a character is standing on a fortress wall in the heat, smelling the sea, hearing voices below, and watching an approaching ship, those details tell the reader something about the world without stopping the action for a history lesson. If they're eating a meal, travelling somewhere, or handling a weapon, the historical details can come through naturally in what they're doing. The food they eat, the means of transportation, the style of weapon—these all convey historical details without becoming history lessons.
And when the characters are in danger, those historical realities can actually make the action more immediate. A cannon isn't just a weapon; it's deafening, disorienting, and difficult to manoeuvre. A sword isn't weightless; after you've been fighting with one for long enough, your arm is going to feel it. I experienced this when I took a two-hour fencing lesson. Within thirty minutes, my shoulder, arm, and hand all felt like lead. Even something as unremarkable as heat can become part of the danger—again, in pursuit of authentic writing, I accidentally gave myself heatstroke on the ramparts of Birgu in Malta. Those physical details allow the reader to experience the period while the action is happening.
That's also why I put so much emphasis on immersive research. I want to understand the physical reality behind what I'm writing. What does the air smell like? How heavy is a broadsword? How loud is a detonating cannon? What does it feel like when a bowstring snaps on my forearm?
The trick is knowing what to leave out. I can spend days researching something and use one sentence of it. That's fine. The research isn't wasted simply because it doesn't all appear on the page.
In fact, I think historical fiction almost tricks the reader into learning history because the research doesn't call attention to itself. They're experiencing the world alongside the characters, and the history becomes part of the story.
By the end of Falcon's Shadow, the characters and the Mediterranean world around them have moved significantly closer to the events that will shape the final book. Without revealing what lies ahead, what emotional ground did you need this novel to cover before the trilogy could move towards its conclusion?
Falcon's Shadow is markedly darker and grittier than Eight Pointed Cross. It does not end with a victory.
It ends with losses—from small, intimate losses to losses that literally reshape the geography of the world. I didn't want the characters to go through everything they do and emerge on the other side unscathed.
By this point in the trilogy, the characters have to start living with the consequences of choices they've already made. There are discoveries, difficult decisions, and betrayals they can't put behind them. All the while, they are being swept towards events much larger than they realize.
The storm has been brewing for some time. In some cases, character decisions have made the Great Siege inevitable; in others, characters are swept into a vortex they had nothing to do with setting in motion. Either way, by the end of Falcon's Shadow, it is clear they can never go back to the lives they knew before.
They all bear marks, and they’ll carry those scars with them into the final book, Ash Fall.
And that's really where I needed Falcon's Shadow to leave them: not ready, not safe, and certainly not healed, but unable to go back. The world has changed, they have changed, and now, annihilation is on the horizon.
Falcon's Shadow
(Siege of Malta Book 2)
HERE
Marthese Fenech
Marthese Fenech is the author of historical novels set in sixteenth-century Malta and Türkiye. She has also written an award-winning television pilot based on her books. Her research has taken her to the ancient streets her characters roamed, the fortresses they defended, the seas they sailed, and the dungeons they escaped. Obstinate curiosity has led her to seventy countries across six continents. She does her best plot weaving while hiking mountain trails, wandering local markets, paddleboarding in cliff-sheltered bays, and curling up with her Siberian husky, who now lives on in her books.
She speaks fluent Maltese and French and knows how to ask for directions to the bathroom in Spanish and Italian. A former kickboxing instructor, she snowboards, surfs, scuba dives, climbs, skydives, throws axes, and practices yoga—sometimes including goats. She divides her time between Ontario and British Columbia, where she lives with her brilliant, mathematically inclined husband. And she carries the memory of her brilliant, musically inclined dog, Niko, who was known to lead family howl sessions on occasion.
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Take Care,
Mary Anne xxx