Trent Dee Stephens, PhD (Anatomy, University of Pennsylvania), has been teaching anatomy and embryology at Idaho State University for over forty years. Medieval history and castles have been his hobby/avocation for over sixty years: buildmodelcastles.com. He has authored or co-authored over thirty books, including A&P textbooks and other non-fiction science books. He also has written books on the relationship between science and religion: trentdeestephens.com. This is his first novel. He lives with his wife, Kathleen, in Southeastern Idaho.

England was a very dangerous place in 1232. Twenty-four-year-old Henry III, King of England, was an inept king, controlled by the powerful and cunning men who surrounded him and pulled him one way and the other; men like Hubert de Burgh on one side and Peter des Roches on the other, men who would not stop at murder to accomplish their plans. As William rode beside his father to his first tournament, he was largely unaware of the great storm brewing within the English court. Little did he know that soon he would be thrust into the center of that storm. The little "witch" and William's nemesis, the Maiden Isolde, warned William several times of his father's pending demise at the coming great Salisbury Tournament, which would be William's first tournament and his father's last. He should have listened.

Much of this book, The Last Tournament, is true. Most of the people in the noble families were real people who actually lived in the thirteenth century. A few people, including some from the noble families and all those of the serving class, are fictional. All the places are real places, and I have attempted to describe them as accurately as I can, 800 years after the events described in this book. All the places are given GPS coordinates that match locations on Google Earth so the reader can zero in on each place and see what the places, such as castles, actually look like today. The food described is taken, as much as possible, from descriptions of actual medieval banquets and recipes. The stories told at the banquets and elsewhere in this book are for the most part taken from actual stories told during the Middle Ages.

At the end of the book is a section called, "Learn More About It." This is somewhat of an illustrated encyclopedic glossary describing in more detail many of the words, names, and places included in this book.