I loved how she wove recent history with the distant past in this story about the French resistance in the Languedoc. In fact, I have not read the previous installments ( Labyrinth and Sepulchre) and didn’t even realize it was part of a trilogy until it arrived in the mail, and I was able to follow it just fine. But Authié wants Raoul for his own purposes: Raoul is in possession of a map belonging to his former comrade, Antoine, who died under torture at the hands of Authié's henchman without revealing its whereabouts. Yet if the Languedoc people managed to rise up and drive out the Nazis anyway, why did they need ghost soldiers? There was simply one dull torrent of conversation followed by another of an almost identical nature.

I found it odd and yet fascinating, Ariunius is a monk, and the word God and Christian is used in his story, but Sandrine is not a believer in God (this remark is made more than once). Citadel is probably best described as a 'time-slip' story, with the main part of the novel set in France during the German occupation in 1942 - 1944. I failed to be moved by the love story because to me it seemed to have been put together in haste, as if the author suddenly realized she needed to have a romance thrown in. Aurelius' journey was not particularly exciting and the hokum about the ghost army was particularly unconvincing.

It just seemed so unnecessary and daft as the culmination of its appearance was unsatisfactory and confusing. The complex history of the Languedoc has proved fertile territory for Kate Mosse in her recent trilogy of adventure novels, beginning with the phenomenally successful Labyrinth in 2005, shortly to be a mini-series, and now reaching its conclusion in Citadel. Mosse seemed to skip over important events, in the narrative, and fill the pages with repetitive dialogue, between the protagonists.

Source: Free advanced reader copy from William Morrow, and France Book Tours, in exchange for a review. Having read and enjoyed Mosse's Labyrinth, I was interested in taking on the third of the novels that make-up her Languedoc trilogy (I have yet to read the second in the series, Sepulchre). In 2013, she was named as one of the Top 100 most influential people in British publishing and also awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to literature. The novel takes place largely between 1942 and 1944, between the occupation and liberation of southern France.The depth of Mosse's descriptions of the plight of the French during the German occupation evoked sympathy and a level of outrage.