A Poisoned Prayer
(2017, Five Rivers) En garde! Paris, in the 1680s. Dashing swordsmen compete for the favours of licentious women, and magic—God’s Blessing—is strong enough that prayers really are answered.
Into the City of Light comes Lise de Trouvaille, a young noblewoman of modest means and no apparent Blessing, searching for an advantageous marriage. But the first eligible man she meets—during a werewolf attack, no less—is exactly the wrong person. Rafael, duc de Bellevasse, is at once too good for her and too bad (he is both the scion of one of the great families of France and a scoundrel presumed to be in league with the Devil, paying huge sums for death-magic spells).
Knowing they are wrong for each other, Lise and Rafael find themselves drawn into plots and conspiracies combining a peasant uprising with the glittering aristocracy surrounding the imperial court. Each has a reason for wanting to solve a series of murders. And each has more than one reason for wanting to avoid the attentions of Nicolas de La Reynie, lieutenant-general of the Paris police and a man who knows, more than most, that something is going badly wrong in Paris.
A Tangled Weave
(2019, Five Rivers) It is forbidden. Possession is a crime. Smugglers are executed. It is not a drug, nor a jewel, nor a precious metal.
It is cloth.
Cotton, to be specific, with colourful patterns painted by artisans in far-off India. Employing protectionist trade, European monarchs have prohibited the stuff. Prohibition, of course, increases demand. Victoire de Berenguer, impoverished aristocrat, counts on that demand to support her if not make her rich.
Enter aristocratic younger son Robert de Vimoutiers, disrespected by his mother―by pretty much everybody―and bored with the frivolous life he leads. He’s looking for adventure.
What he finds is Victoire. Will the empire survive the encounter?
A Tangled Weave continues the magical saga begun in A Poisoned Prayer. Let the delicious adventure continue.
Dixie's Land
(2019, Herridge Lake Public Library) It is 1851. The United States have been at war with one another for nearly a year, with nine states fighting to sustain their right to secede from the Union. Watching nervously from the sidelines and dominating the northern and western portions of the continent is the Kingdom of Canada. It is to Canada's winter capital, New Orleans, that the Confederate Captain Charles Stewart is sent by his government to assist in the negotiating of a treaty of recognition between Canada and the CSA. More than negotiation is going to happen, though...
Dixie's Land is a story of intrigue, duty, and betrayal. It introduces a richly detailed alternate-history timeline, to be explored in a series of novels spanning the second half of the nineteenth century and the earlier years of the twentieth.
Download a free epub (compressed folder) here.
High Risk
(2019, Herridge Lake Public Library) The U. S. economy is booming. So is Hollywood, as studios at last come to grips with the technological revolution that is synchronized sound. From the perspective of early October 1929, the future is as bright as a switched-on Klieg light.
Not everybody is singing in the rain, though. Casey, an ex-fighter pilot and Great War veteran, is still living with the repercussions of a very hostile encounter with a very powerful—and short-tempered—young man: the 23-year-old Howard Hughes. When your only marketable skill is flying, you can't afford to piss off the millionaire who is making the most expensive aviation movie ever.
But the mercurial Mr. Hughes turns out to be the least of Casey's problems. When flying for a low-budget Poverty Row studio is the only work he can get, Casey soon finds more than his career is at stake. A duplicitous director, scheming or desperate stars, a crooked criminal justice system, and good old-fashioned murder threaten to bring Casey down in a crash he won't be able to walk away from.
High Risk is a murder mystery that, like its hero, explores the low-level fringes and the elevated heights of Hollywood at the beginning of its golden age.
Download a free epub book (compressed folder) here.
The Bonny Blue Flag
The Republic of Texas is broke. Two very different men, however, still believe in the future of the republic and the gold-starred blue flag that is its symbol. One of these men is William Barret Travis, the republic's secretary of state.
The other is William Walker, a mercenary colonel at the centre of a conspiracy to make Texas a part of the Confederate States of America, currently fighting for their freedom from the United States. Walker, while being paid by a shadowy group in and around the Confederate government, has plans of his own, plans he hasn't yet shared with his employers.
Or with George S. Patton, the young Confederate officer from Virginia who, at the end of Dixie's Land, gave up his CSA commission to join Walker's invasion of Texas. Patton wants to become a hero and a leader of men, and he thinks service with Walker is the way to do this. And he's prepared to ignore any evidence that might prevent him from wholehearted support of the filibuster.
Patton's friend, Captain Charles Stewart, has seen the evidence too and cannot ignore it. He is racing from Virginia to Texas, hoping to reach the capital, Washington-on-the-Brazos, before it's too late to stop the invasion and conquest. Before it's too late to prevent an entire continent, if not the world, from going to war.
The Bonny Blue Flag is the sequel to Dixie's Land, and is being serialized on this blog from the beginning of September. Start reading it here.
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