What every author wants

I hadn't realised, until Amazon told me, that there is a new book by Manda Scott. Her first novels were very distinctively flavoured crime fiction; then she changed direction and wrote the strange and wonderful Boudica series. Now, it seems, she has written her Da Vinci Code:

Ancient Wisdom predicts the end of the world with uncanny precision.

But it also provides the key to staving off apocalypse: a flawless sapphire of incomparable beauty carved into the perfect likeness of a human skull.

This is a fast-paced thriller, weaving contemporary and Elizabethan threads. It explores the Mayan prophecy, given in the Dresden Codex, that the end of the fifth age (ours) will take place on 21st December 2012. To give us hope, the Maya carved 13 skulls and sent them around the world. Only when all thirteen are joined together can the Ouroborous, the world snake, Kukulkan, also known as Quetzlcoatl, arise to save the world from oblivion.

Random House are sufficiently excited about it to set up a website devoted to the book, The Crystal Skull, with an extract and an audio piece from Manda and - and admit it, this is what you've always secretly longed for - a Crystal Skull themed gemdrop game. Warning: it's inane but hypnotic.