The Dante Deception

the most dangerous enemy is the one closest to your heart

A forger. A grifter. A gangster. A soldier. A ballerina.

Who will win when a deadly web ensnares them all?

The Dante Deception: A Natalie Brandon Thriller by Jenni Wiltz

A 700-year-old Dante manuscript up for auction is a fake. To stop the auction, a group of scoundrels will race to find the forger…uncovering a web of lies spun over forty years and four countries, ensnaring a British baron, a Bolshoi ballerina, a Russian mobster – and the elusive Soviet defector who ties them all together.

Winner: Second Place
2016 Reedsy & Authors.me Operation: Thriller Contest

Authors.me Thriller Contest: Second Place

This book has already had a long, strange history.

It’s about to get longer and stranger.

I only intended to write a prequel to The Romanov Legacy. It was going to be a freebie, a bonus for people who signed up for my mailing list. But then the characters took over, and soon I was staring down the barrel of more than a hundred pages. Then two hundred pages. Then three hundred pages.

And here’s the worst part.

My heroine, Natalie, met all the characters in the book that theoretically comes after this one. So her storyline had to intersect with theirs…without her remembering a thing. That’s a tall order.

By the time it was finished, this book was about 500 pages…and I skipped years (decades in some case) to get you through it as fast as I could.

Obviously, something was terribly wrong with the way I’d set things up.

So in summer 2019, I unpublished it and removed it from the Natalie Brandon thriller series. Instead, I’m rewriting it as a trilogy that will stand beside that series. The characters will still intersect – in the Dante series, you’ll meet Constantine, Viktor, Vadim, Liliya, all of whom show up in The Romanov Legacy.

You’ll also meet the Sinclairs, a family of grifters who are going to come into play in the fourth Natalie Brandon book (which is outlined but not written yet).

Making this book a trilogy is the only way I can do justice to these characters.

Three years later, they’re as fresh in my mind as ever. I sat down to write, not sure how I’d feel about the project, the characters, or any of it. Turns out, it’s like I never left them. Sinclair and Severin are my favorite characters, and I can’t wait to spend more time with them. I have big plans for them…and for when they meet Natalie.

Want to know when the new trilogy is ready?

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