The Alchemist's Codex: A pulse-pounding archaeological thriller (Eden Black book 8) - Paperback

by Luke Richardson (Author)

WHAT IF THE SECRET OF ETERNAL LIFE IS REAL, AND SOMEONE HAS ALREADY USED IT?

When EDEN BLACK finds a dead man inside Notre-Dame de Paris, one detail makes no sense - the body is hundreds of years old.

All the evidence points to something impossible - the dead man is Fulcanelli, the legendary alchemist who claimed he had found the secret of eternal life, then disappeared.

But with the discovery comes danger. A pharmaceutical billionaire has already spent millions searching for Fulcanelli and his lost codex. The book is a threat to his empire, and a secret he'll kill to control.

From the cathedrals and catacombs of Paris to a secluded château and the last stronghold of the Cathars, Eden must find the codex before the one man who would destroy it forever.

THE ALCHEMIST'S CODEX is a race-against-time archaeological thriller for fans of Dan Brown, Scott Mariani, Steve Berry and James Rollins.

The Alchemist's Codex Frequently Asked Questions:

Is The Alchemist's Codex based on a true story?

The bones of it are true. Fulcanelli and his student Canseliet existed, and Hitler did make his one visit to Paris on 23 June 1940, stopping at the Sacré-Coeur. The Château de Dampierre's ceiling, Les UX, Montségur and Saint-Merri are all as described. The Codex, the villain and what Eden finds are fiction.

Is Fulcanelli a real person?

Yes. Fulcanelli was a French alchemist who published Le Mystère des Cathédrales in 1926, arguing that Notre-Dame and the great Gothic cathedrals were alchemical textbooks written in stone. Then he vanished. Nobody has proved who he really was, and Canseliet claimed to have met him decades later looking younger than before.

Do I need to have read the other Eden Black books first?

No. Every Eden Black thriller stands on its own, and this one opens with a new case and a new villain, though readers of The Sahara Event will spot its fallout.

Is the Notre-Dame fire part of the plot?

The 2019 fire and the extraordinary rebuild are the backdrop for the whole book. The novel doesn't invent a new cause for the fire, but asks what a very rich, very determined man might do with a restoration project if he believed something was hidden beneath the cathedral.

Where in Paris does the book take place?

The Sacré-Coeur, Notre-Dame and its towers, the Panthéon, the catacombs and Église Saint-Merri all feature. The story then heads to the Château de Dampierre-sur-Boutonne, whose gallery ceiling is covered in alchemical emblems, and south to Montségur in the Pyrenees.

What is Les UX, and are they real?

They are. Les UX, or the Urban eXperiment, are a secretive Paris collective who slip into forgotten spaces beneath the city and quietly restore them. They famously built a hidden cinema under the Trocadéro.

Is there any real alchemy in the book?

A great deal of real alchemical history, from the cathedral figures alchemists read as instructions to Nicolas Flamel, the Cathars of Montségur and Otto Rahn, who went looking for the Holy Grail there.

Is The Alchemist's Codex clean or family-friendly?

Yes. Like the rest of the Eden Black Archaeological Thriller Series, it has action and danger throughout but nothing gratuitously violent or explicit.