The Book
Fatal Castle; David Boito; Pen & Sword Books; 2025
Summary
I received an email from the author asking if I would like a review copy of this novel. Of course, I agreed. I had read Megan Clawson’s Falling Hard for the Royal Guard a couple of years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. It tells the tale of the daughter of a Yeoman Warder and her romance with one of the Scots Guards serving at the Tower of London.
David Boito’s Fatal Castle sounded similar—it, too, follows the adventures of a daughter of the Chief Yeoman Warder. And that’s where the similarities end. Clawson’s book is a light romance; Boito’s is a suspense-thriller in which a rogue bomb squad attempts to steal the Koh-i-Noor diamond from the Tower. Our heroine, Ashley, and her father, Clive, try to stop the thieves using a variety of medieval arms.
Review
The premise is intriguing: a modern-day diamond heist set in a thousand-year-old fortress steeped in history. While the story moves along briskly, I found myself stumbling at several points.
The book would benefit from another editorial pass, as there are numerous grammatical errors that trip up the reader. There are no “Scotch Guards,” only Scots Guards. It is Water Street, not Waterfront Street. I don’t believe that “…he trodded up the steps…” works. At one point we’re told the Scots Guards are performing their “regal goose-step.” The goose-step—a high-stepping march—is not performed by His Majesty’s forces; it’s more commonly associated with autocratic regimes like Nazi Germany, North Korea, and Russia. Scots Guards march; they do not goose-step. In addition, the Scots Guards are not the only regiment to perform ceremonial duties at the Tower of London. The four other Foot Guards regiments—Grenadier, Coldstream, Irish, and Welsh—also rotate through.
Several scenes also stretch plausibility to the breaking point. Ashley and Clive sneak onto the second floor of the White Tower to gather a supply of longbows and crossbows, which they load onto a cart and wheel to the basement. The problem? The White Tower has no elevator—except the one connecting the basement shop to the ground level—so it’s unclear how they manoeuvred a cart of weapons up and down narrow spiral staircases. At another point, one of the thieves locks Clive in one of the former zoo enclosures, conveniently finding an unclasped padlock hanging there. Clive manages to escape with a paper clip, though one wonders why he didn’t use the formidable set of keys he’s described as always carrying. Later, while sneaking through a secret tunnel under the Tower, Ashley uses her phone as a flashlight until the battery dies—yet not long after, she uses the same phone to take a picture of her father trying on medieval cuirasses.
Beyond language and plausibility, the geography of the Tower itself is often misrendered. The Tower Green, for example, is not the entire Inner Ward but a small, fenced lawn west of the Chapel Royal where private executions took place. One does not simply “walk across the Tower Green.” The lawn south of the White Tower is not the same area. At another point, characters leave the White Tower and sneak along the Inner Wall toward Waterloo Barracks—an awkward route that would, in reality, have required them to dash across open ground to reach the Inner Wall. It would make far more sense to simply dash across open ground to the Waterloo Barracks.
Clive later seals the Inner Wall at the Bloody Gate so that the thieves guarding the main gate cannot join their compatriots. While he blocks the raised walkway connecting the Wakefield Tower and St. Thomas’s Tower, he overlooks the routes farther east, past the Wakefield and Lanthorn Towers. But that’s a minor detail, since the thieves are only guarding the main entrance at the Byward Tower and don’t seem to realize the police could burst through the two drawbridge entrances from Tower Wharf. I found myself flipping repeatedly to the map at the front of the book to double-check the feasibility of their meanderings.
It’s a pity, really. Where Megan Clawson’s novel benefited from an insider’s familiarity with the Tower—its rhythms, layout, and lived-in detail—Boito’s version feels imagined from afar. The idea itself is strong, but the execution never quite matches the setting’s potential.
Review Score
3 out of 5 – It’s a neat idea, but the plausibility gaps and muddled Tower geography kept me from fully enjoying this book.
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