Read The Prince for Free & Get an Excerpt of The Malice of Fortune

What fortunes, good and bad, led Machiavelli to write The Prince? For a limited time, download a free e-book of The Prince that includes five chapters from the forthcoming novel, The Malice of Fortune, a heart-pounding, mind-bending mystery that pits Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci against a ruthless serial killer, set in the seething heart of Borgia politics (available this Fall from Doubleday). You can order this free e-book now for Kindle, Nook, iBooks, or wherever else e-books are sold. In the foreword to this new edition of W.K. Marriott’s classic translation, The Malice of Fortune author Michael Ennis delves into the motivations and machinations behind Machiavelli’s work.

The year is 1502. The Borgia pope, Alexander, dispatches a Vatican courtesan, Damiata, to the remote fortress city of Imola. She is charged with learning the truth behind the murder of Juan, the pope’s most beloved illegitimate son. She cannot fail, for the scheming pope holds her own young son hostage. Once there, Damiata becomes a pawn in the political intrigues of the pope’s surviving son, the charismatic Duke Valentino, whose own life is threatened by the condottieri, a powerful cabal of mercenary warlords. Damiata suspects that the killer she seeks is one of the brutal condottierri, and as the murders multiply, her quest grows more urgent. She enlists the help of an obscure Florentine diplomat, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Valentino’s eccentric military engineer, Leonardo da Vinci, who together must struggle to decipher the killer’s taunting riddles: Leonardo with his groundbreaking “science of observation” and Machiavelli with his new “science of men.” Traveling across an Italy torn apart by war, they will enter a labyrinth of ancient superstition and erotic obsession to discover at its center a new face of evil-and a truth that will shake the foundations of western civilization.

Download this all-time classic – and preview a new classic – today. Make sure you read through it all – there may be a clue for winning an early copy of The Malice of Fortune.