This long-anticipated sequel to the national bestseller Lionheartis
a vivid and heart-wrenching story of the last event-filled years in the
life of Richard, Coeur de Lion. Taken captive by the Holy Roman Emperor
while en route home—in violation of the papal decree protecting all
crusaders—he was to spend fifteen months chained in a dungeon while
Eleanor of Aquitaine moved heaven and earth to raise the exorbitant
ransom. But a further humiliation awaited him: he was forced to kneel
and swear fealty to his bitter enemy. For the five years remaining to
him, betrayals, intrigues, wars, and illness were ever present. So were
his infidelities, perhaps a pattern set by his father’s faithlessness to
Eleanor. But the courage, compassion, and intelligence of this warrior
king became the stuff of legend, and A King’s Ransom brings the man and his world fully and powerfully alive.
The Mapmaker’s Daughter by Laurel Corona (Mar 4th)
Valencia, 1492. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issue an order
expelling all Jews who refuse to convert to Christianity. Amalia Cresques,
daughter of a Jewish mapmaker whose services were so valuable that his faith had
been ignored, can no longer evade the throne. She must leave her beloved atlas,
her house, her country, forever. As Amalia remembers her past, living as a converso,
hiding her faith, she must decide whether to risk the wrath of the Inquisition
or relinquish what’s left of her true life. A mesmerizing saga about faith,
family and Jewish identity.
Fallen Beauty by Erika Robuck (Mar 4th) Upstate New York, 1928. Laura Kelley and the man she loves sneak away from their judgmental town to attend a performance of the scandalous Ziegfeld Follies. But the dark consequences of their night of daring and delight reach far into the future.…That same evening, Bohemian poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and her indulgent husband hold a wild party in their remote mountain estate, hoping to inspire her muse. Millay declares her wish for a new lover who will take her to unparalleled heights of passion and poetry, but for the first time, the man who responds will not bend completely to her will.…Two years later, Laura, an unwed seamstress struggling to support her daughter, and Millay, a woman fighting the passage of time, work together secretly to create costumes for Millay’s next grand tour. As their complex, often uneasy friendship develops amid growing local condemnation, each woman is forced to confront what it means to be a fallen woman…and to decide for herself what price she is willing to pay to live a full life.
The Rebel Pirate by Donna Thorland (Mar 4th)
1775, Boston Harbor. James Sparhawk, Master and Commander
in the British Navy, knows trouble when he sees it. The ship he’s boarded is
carrying ammunition and gold into a country on the knife’s edge of war.
Sparhawk’s duty is clear: confiscate the cargo, impound the vessel and seize
the crew. But when one of the ship’s boys turns out to be a lovely girl, with a
loaded pistol and dead-shot aim, Sparhawk finds himself held hostage aboard a
Rebel privateer. Sarah Ward never set
out to break the law. Before Boston became a powder keg, she was poised to
escape the stigma of being a notorious pirate’s daughter by wedding Micah Wild,
one of Salem’s most successful merchants. Then a Patriot mob destroyed her
fortune and Wild played her false by marrying her best friend and smuggling a
chest of Rebel gold aboard her family’s ship.
Now branded a pirate herself, Sarah will do what she must to secure her
family’s safety and her own future. Even if that means taking part in the cat
and mouse game unfolding in Boston Harbor, the desperate naval fight between
British and Rebel forces for the materiel of war—and pitting herself against
James Sparhawk, the one man she cannot resist.
Celebrating the healing power of
food and the magic of New York City, A Place at the Table follows the lives of
three seekers who come together in the understanding that when you embrace the
thing that makes you different, you become whole. A Place at the Table tells
the story of three unforgettable characters whose paths converge in a storied
Manhattan café: Bobby, a young gay man from Georgia who has been ostracized by
his family; Amelia, a wealthy Connecticut woman whose life is upended when a
family secret comes to light; and Alice, an African-American chef from North
Carolina whose heritage is the basis of a renowned cookbook but whose past is a
mystery to those who know her. These characters are exiles—from homeland, from
marriage, from family. While they all find companionship and careers through
cooking, they hunger for the deeper nourishment of communion. As the narrative
sweeps from a freed-slave settlement in 1920s North Carolina to Manhattan
during the deadly AIDS epidemic of the 1980s to the well-heeled hamlet of
contemporary Old Greenwich, Connecticut, Bobby, Amelia, and Alice are asked to
sacrifice everything they ever knew or cared about to find authenticity and
fulfillment.
When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F.
Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old
and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the
“ungettable” Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn’t
wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that
his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply
unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise,
to Scribner’s, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the
vestry of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and take the rest as it comes. What comes,
here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined attention and success and
celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda legends in their own time. Everyone
wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel—and his witty,
perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, adopts daring new
fashions, and revels in this wild new world. Each place they go becomes a
playground: New York City, Long Island, Hollywood, Paris, and the French
Riviera—where they join the endless party of the glamorous, sometimes doomed
Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and
Gertrude Stein. Everything seems new and possible. Troubles, at first, seem to
fade like morning mist. But not even Jay Gatsby’s parties go on forever. Who is
Zelda, other than the wife of a famous—sometimes infamous—husband? How can she
forge her own identity while fighting her demons and Scott’s, too?
City
of Darkness and Light by Rhys Bowen (Mar 4th)
Molly and Daniel Sullivan are
settling happily into the new routines of parenthood, but their domestic bliss
is shattered when a gang retaliates against Daniel after he makes a big arrest.
Daniel wants his family safely out of New York as soon as possible. Knowing she
needs to protect their young son Liam, Molly agrees to take him on the long
journey to Paris to stay with her friends Sid and Gus, who are studying art in
the City of Light. But upon arriving in Paris, nothing goes as planned. Sid and
Gus are nowhere to be found, and Molly's search for them leads
her to the doorstep of a renowned Impressionist artist, whom
she's horrified to learn has just been murdered. The longer
Molly goes without finding her friends, and the more she learns
about the painter's death, the more she starts to wonder if she and
Liam might be in even more danger in Paris than they were at home.
Why Kings Confess: a
Sebastian St Cyr Mystery by C.S. Harris (Mar 4th)
Regency
England, January 1813: When a badly injured Frenchwoman is found beside the
mutilated body of Dr. Damion Pelletan in one of London’s worst slums, Sebastian
finds himself caught in a high-stakes tangle of murder and revenge. Although
the woman, Alexi Sauvage, has no memory of the attack, Sebastian knows her all
too well from an incident in his past—an act of wartime brutality and betrayal
that nearly destroyed him. As the search for the killer leads Sebastian into a
treacherous web of duplicity, he discovers that Pelletan was part of a secret
delegation sent by Napoleon to investigate the possibility of peace with
Britain. Despite his powerful father-in-law’s warnings, Sebastian plunges deep
into the mystery of the “Lost Dauphin,” the boy prince who disappeared in the
darkest days of the French Revolution, and soon finds himself at lethal odds
with the Dauphin’s sister—the imperious, ruthless daughter of Marie
Antoinette—who is determined to retake the French crown at any cost. With the
murderer striking ever closer, Sebastian must battle new fears about Hero’s
health and that of their soon-to-be born child. When he realizes the key to
their survival may lie in the hands of an old enemy, he must finally face the
truth about his own guilt in a past he has found too terrible to
consider....
On a sultry night in June 1897, Pyotr Ivanovich Balenov, a
young Russian, and two young women transport a dead man through the narrow
streets of a working class neighborhood in Paris. They throw the body into the
canal and the girls flee to the Latin Quarter to hide with one of Pyotr’s
anarchist “comrades.” They do not realize that they, too, are being watched. Their subsequent disappearance and the violent
acts that follow will set Clarie Martin, a teacher and mother of a toddler, and
her husband, magistrate Bernard Martin (last seen in Cezanne's
Quarry and The Blood of Lorraine) on a dangerous quest to
rescue them from a vicious killer in fin-de-siecle Paris.
Jean Zimmerman’s new novel tells of the dramatic events
that transpire when an alluring, blazingly smart eighteen-year-old girl named
Bronwyn, reputedly raised by wolves in the wilds of Nevada, is adopted in 1875
by the Delegates, an outlandishly wealthy Manhattan couple, and taken back East
to be civilized and introduced into high society. Bronwyn hits the highly mannered world of
Edith Wharton era Manhattan like a bomb. A series of suitors, both young and
old, find her irresistible, but the willful girl’s illicit lovers begin to turn
up murdered. Zimmerman’s tale is
narrated by the Delegate’s son, a Harvard anatomy student. The tormented, self-dramatizing
Hugo Delegate speaks from a prison cell where he is prepared to take the fall
for his beloved Savage Girl. This narrative—a love story and a mystery with a
powerful sense of fable—is his confession.
In 1631 Elizabeth Winthrop, newly
widowed with an infant daughter, set sail for the New World. In those days of
hardship, famine, and Indian attack, there was only one way, in the minds of
the governors of the Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut colonies, to hold
together the sanity and identity of the colonists. That was through a strong
and bigoted, theocratic government. It
is against this background of rigidity and conformity that Bess Winthrop dared
to befriend Anne Hutchinson at the moment of her banishment from the Bay Colony;
dared to challenge a determined army captain bent on the massacre of her
friends the Siwanoy Indians; and, above all, dared to love a man as her heart
and her whole being commanded. And so, as a response to this almost unmatched
courage and vitality, Governor John Winthrop came to refer to this woman in the
historical records of the time as his "unregenerate niece." Anya
Seton’s riveting historical novel portrays the fortitude, humiliation, and
ultimate triumph of the Winthrop woman, who believed in a concept of happiness
transcending that of her own day.
The Lie by Helen Dunmore
(Mar 10th)
Cornwall,
1920. Infantry officer Daniel Branwell has returned to his coastal hometown
after the war. Unmoored and alone, Daniel spends his days in solitude, quietly
working the land. However, all is not as it seems in the peaceful idylls of the
countryside; and although he has left the trenches, Daniel cannot escape his
dreadful past. As former friendships re-ignite, Daniel is drawn deeper and
deeper into the tangled traumas of his youth and the memories of his best
friend and his first love. Old wounds reopen, and old troubles resurface,
though none so great as the lie that threatens to ruin Daniel's life, the lie
from which he cannot run.
The Lost Sisterhood
tells the story of Diana, a young and aspiring—but somewhat aimless—professor
at Oxford. Her fascination with the history of the Amazons, the legendary warrior
women of ancient Greece, is deeply connected with her own family’s history; her
grandmother in particular. When Diana is invited to consult on an archeological
excavation, she quickly realizes that here, finally, may be the proof that the
Amazons were real. The Amazons’ “true”
story—and Diana’s history—is threaded along with this modern day hunt. This
historical back-story focuses on a group of women, and more specifically on two
sisters, whose fight to survive takes us through ancient Athens and to Troy,
where the novel reinvents our perspective on the famous Trojan War.
In the wake of her divorce, Maggie Livingstone leaves her
native Glasgow to rent a holiday cottage at the foot of Dunadd, an ancient
Pictish hill fort in the Scottish highlands, where the kings of Scotland were
once crowned. There she is hoping to find time to herself to finish a
post-graduate thesis on the witch burnings she started before her marriage. But there is too much in Maggie’s past to
allow for much peace and quiet: There’s her epilepsy for which a scheduled
surgery might be her only chance of “normality;” there’s the recent death of
her eleven year-old daughter, Ellie; there’s her teenage son, who left for
boarding school when tensions at home became intolerable. But most of all, there are those vivid dreams
Maggie has in the deep sleep after seizures which make her draw only a fuzzy
line between waking and sleeping. Dunadd, with its own vibrant history, starts
to cross that line, and soon Maggie isn’t sure if she is only dreaming about
her forays back to 735AD. Fergus, the
king of Dunadd’s recently widowed brother, certainly seems real enough to be
more than a passing interest to Maggie. Sula the druidess paints quite a
different picture of the pagan religion than Maggie had understood from her
research. And then there is Fergus’s young daughter, who is so like her own
daughter, Maggie can’t decide which world she belongs in. Back in her own time, Maggie discovers in an
ancient census that 735 AD was the year of a devastating earthquake at Dunadd.
With the date of her surgery fast approaching, Maggie knows she has to get back
to warn Fergus to take his daughter and leave the fort, that the era of his
family’s rule at Dunadd is about to come to an abrupt end.
I didn't stand a chance:
looking back over thirteen years, that's what I see. In the very first instant,
I was won over, and of course I was: I was fifteen and had been nowhere and
done nothing, whereas Katherine was twenty-one and yellow-silk-clad and just
married to the golden boy. Only a few years later, I'd be blaming myself for not
having somehow seen ... but seen what, really? What - really, honestly - was
there to see, when she walked into Hall? She was just a girl, a lovely,
light-stepping girl, smiling that smile of hers, and, back then, as giddy with
goodwill as the rest of us.
When Katherine Filliol arrives at Wolf Hall as the new young bride of Jane Seymour's older brother, Edward, Jane is irresistibly drawn to the confident older girl and they develop a close and trusting friendship, forged during a long, hot country summer. However, only two years later, the family is destroyed by Edward's allegations of Katherine's infidelity with his father. When Jane is also sent away, to serve Katharine of Aragon, she watches another wife being put aside, with terrible consequences.
When Katherine Filliol arrives at Wolf Hall as the new young bride of Jane Seymour's older brother, Edward, Jane is irresistibly drawn to the confident older girl and they develop a close and trusting friendship, forged during a long, hot country summer. However, only two years later, the family is destroyed by Edward's allegations of Katherine's infidelity with his father. When Jane is also sent away, to serve Katharine of Aragon, she watches another wife being put aside, with terrible consequences.
The Visitors by Patrick O’Keeffe (Mar 13th)
James
Dwyer was born in rural county Limerick before moving to Dublin as a teenager
and ultimately settling in Ann Arbor. One night James’s past appears in the
form of a down-and-out man named Walter, who issues an invitation for James to
come to Upstate New York to visit his old childhood neighbor, Kevin Lyons.
Although neither James nor Kevin particularly cares for each other, there’s no
denying their complicated past. Kevin and James’s sister, Tess, were lovers
while James fell hard for Kevin’s sister, Una.
Blood & Beauty by
Sarah Dunant (in PB Mar 14th)
By
the end of the fifteenth century, the beauty and creativity of Italy is matched
only by its brutality and corruption. When Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia buys his way
into the papacy as Alexander VI, the charismatic, consummate politician with a
huge appetite for women and power knows that it will take his entire family to
ensure his triumphant legacy as pope. His eldest son Cesare, with his
dazzlingly cold intelligence and even colder soul, is Rodrigo's greatest-though
increasingly unstable-weapon. Lucrezia, Rodrigo's beloved, beautiful daughter,
is his prime dynastic tool.
England, 1538. A bloody power
struggle between crown and cross tears England asunder. Young Joanna Stafford
has already tasted the wrath of the royal court, seen what lies inside the
king's torture rooms and escaped death at the hands of those desperate to
possess the power of an ancient relic. After seeing such sights, the quiet life
is not for Joanna. Soon she risks arrest and imprisonment again, when she is
caught up in a conspiracy scheming against Henry VIII. As the powerplays grow
deadly, Joanna must realise if her role is more central than she'd ever
imagined. As one fateful night at the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket proves, she
must make a choice between those she cares for most and taking her place in a
prophecy foretold by three different seers, each more powerful than the last.
To learn the final, sinister piece of the prophecy, she flees across Europe
with an amoral spy sent by Spain. As the necromancers complete the puzzle,
Joanna realises the life of Henry VIII as well as the future of Christendom are
in her hands; hands which must someday hold the chalice that lies at the centre
of these deadly prophecies...
Roosevelt’s
Beast by Louis Bayard (Mar 18th)
1914. Brazil’s Rio da Dúvida, the
River of Doubt. Plagued by hunger and suffering the lingering effects of
malaria, Theodore Roosevelt, his son Kermit, and the other members of the
now-ravaged Roosevelt-Rondon scientific expedition are traveling deeper and
deeper into the jungle. When Kermit and Teddy are kidnapped by a never-before-seen
Amazonian tribe, the great hunters are asked one thing in exchange for their
freedom: find and kill a beast that leaves no tracks and that no member of the
tribe has ever seen. But what are the origins of this beast, and how do they
escape its brutal wrath? Roosevelt's Beast
is a story of the impossible things that become possible when civilization is
miles away, when the mind plays tricks on itself, and when old family secrets
refuse to stay buried. With his characteristically rich storytelling and a touch
of old-fashioned horror, the bestselling and critically acclaimed Louis Bayard
turns the story of the well-known Roosevelt-Rondon expedition on its head and
dares to ask: Are the beasts among us more frightening than the beasts within?
On the eve of the twentieth century, Mary Mallon emigrated
from Ireland at age fifteen to make her way in New York City. Brave,
headstrong, and dreaming of being a cook, she fought to climb up from the
lowest rung of the domestic-service ladder. Canny and enterprising, she worked
her way to the kitchen, and discovered in herself the true talent of a chef.
Sought after by New York aristocracy, and with an independence rare for a woman
of the time, she seemed to have achieved the life she’d aimed for when she
arrived in Castle Garden. Then one determined “medical engineer” noticed that
she left a trail of disease wherever she cooked, and identified her as an
“asymptomatic carrier” of Typhoid Fever. With this seemingly preposterous
theory, he made Mallon a hunted woman. The
Department of Health sent Mallon to North Brother Island, where she was kept in
isolation from 1907 to 1910, then released under the condition that she never
work as a cook again. Yet for Mary—proud of her former status and passionate
about cooking—the alternatives were abhorrent. She defied the edict.
June,
1945:In
newly liberated Paris, battle-ravaged photographer Robert Capa is drowning his
sorrows. After ten years of recording horror and violence, he longs for a
diversion. Ingrid Bergman has been sent to entertain the troops and when she
walks into the Ritz Hotel Capa is enchanted. From the moment he slips a mischievous
invitation to dinner under her door, the two find themselves helplessly
attracted. Ingrid, tired of her passionless marriage, and her controlling film
studio, is desperate for freedom and excitement. And Capa is willing to oblige.
Dinners in cafes he can’t afford. Night walks along the Seine. Dancing barefoot
in nightclubs. Trysts in hotel rooms. He brings her back to life and she fills
the hole inside him. But with everything
at stake, both Capa and Ingrid are presented with terrible choices.
Carcassonne 1942. A spirited and courageous young woman,
Sandrine, finds herself drawn into the world of the Resistance in Carcassonne
under German Occupation. Her network - codenamed 'Citadel' - is made up of
ordinary women who risk everything to fight the sinister battles raging in the
shadows around them. As the war reaches
its violent and bloody conclusion, Sandrine's fate is tied up with that of
three very different men. But who is the real enemy? Who is the real threat?
And who is the true guardian of the ancient secrets that for generations have
drawn people to the foothills of the Pyrenean Mountains?
Queen
Elizabeth’s Daughter by Anne Clinard Barnhill (Mar 18th)
Mistress Mary Shelton is Queen
Elizabeth’s favorite ward, enjoying every privilege the position affords. The
queen loves Mary like a daughter, and, like any good mother, she wants her to
make a powerful match. The most likely prospect: Edward de Vere, Earl of
Oxford. But while Oxford seems to be everything the queen admires:
clever, polished and wealthy, Mary knows him to be lecherous, cruel, and full
of treachery. No matter how hard the queen tries to push her into his
arms, Mary refuses. Instead, Mary falls in love with a man who is completely
unsuitable. Sir John Skydemore is a minor knight with little money, a widower
with five children. Worst of all, he’s a Catholic at a time when Catholic
plots against Elizabeth are rampant. The queen forbids Mary to wed the man she
loves. When the young woman, who is the queen’s own flesh and blood, defies
her, the couple finds their very lives in danger as Elizabeth’s wrath knows no
bounds.
Hyde by Daniel Levine (Mar 18th)
Mr. Hyde is hiding, trapped in Dr. Jekyll’s
surgical cabinet, counting the hours until capture. As four days pass, he has
the chance, finally, to tell the story of his brief, marvelous life. We join
Hyde, awakened after years of dormancy, in the mind he hesitantly shares with
Jekyll. We spin with dizzy confusion as the potions take effect. We tromp
through the dark streets of Victorian London. We watch Jekyll’s high-class life
at a remove, blurred by a membrane of consciousness. We feel the horror of lost
time, the helplessness of knowing we are responsible for the actions of a body
not entirely our own. Girls have gone missing. Someone has been killed. The
evidence points to Mr. Hyde. Someone is framing him, terrorizing him with
cryptic notes and whisper campaigns. Who can it be? Even if these crimes
weren’t of his choosing, can they have been by his hand?
City of Jasmine by Deanna
Raybourn (Mar 25th)
Famed
aviatrix Evangeline Starke never expected to see her husband, adventurer
Gabriel Starke, ever again. They had been a golden couple, enjoying a whirlwind
courtship amid the backdrop of a glittering social set in prewar London until
his sudden death with the sinking of the Lusitania. Five years later, beginning
to embrace life again, Evie embarks upon a flight around the world, collecting
fame and admirers along the way. In the midst of her triumphant tour, she is
shocked to receive a mysterious—and recent—photograph of Gabriel, which brings
her ambitious stunt to a screeching halt. With her eccentric aunt Dove in
tow, Evie tracks the source of the photo to the ancient City of Jasmine,
Damascus. There she discovers that nothing is as it seems. Danger lurks at
every turn, and at stake is a priceless relic, an artifact once lost to time
and so valuable that criminals will stop at nothing to acquire it—even murder.
Leaving the jewelled city behind, Evie sets off across the punishing sands of
the desert to unearth the truth of Gabriel's disappearance and retrieve a relic
straight from the pages of history.
For
Lucy Campion, a seventeenth-century English chambermaid serving in the
household of the local magistrate, life is an endless repetition of polishing
pewter, emptying chamber pots, and dealing with other household chores until a
fellow servant is ruthlessly killed, and someone she loves is wrongly arrested
for the crime. In a time where the accused are presumed guilty until proven
innocent, lawyers aren't permitted to defend their clients, and--if the plague
doesn't kill them first--public executions draw a large crowd of spectators,
Lucy knows she may never see this person alive again. Unless, that is, she can
identify the true murderer. Determined
to do just that, Lucy finds herself venturing out of her expected station and
into raucous printers' shops, secretive gypsy camps, the foul streets of
London, and even the bowels of Newgate prison on a trail that might lead her
straight into the arms of the killer.
Berlin, March, 1943. A
month has passed since the stunning defeat at Stalingrad. Though Hitler insists
Germany is winning the war, commanders on the ground know better. Morale is
low, discipline at risk. Now word has reached Berlin of a Red massacre of
Polish officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. If true, the message it
would send to the troops is clear: Fight on or risk certain death. For once,
both the Wehrmacht and Propaganda Minister Goebbels want the same thing:
irrefutable evidence of this Russian atrocity. To the Wehrmacht, such proof
will soften the reality of its own war crimes in the eyes of the victors. For
Goebbels, such proof could turn the tide of war by destroying the Alliance,
cutting Russia off from its western supply lines. Both parties agree that the ensuing
investigation must be overseen by a professional trained in sifting evidence
and interrogating witnesses. Anything that smells of incompetence or tampering
will defeat their purposes. And so Bernie Gunther is dispatched to Smolensk,
where truth is as much a victim of war as those poor dead Polish officers. Smolensk, March, 1943. Army Group Center is an enclave of
Prussian aristocrats who have owned the Wehrmacht almost as long as they’ve
owned their baronial estates, an officer class whose families have been
intermarrying for generations. The wisecracking, rough-edged Gunther is not a
good fit. He is, after all, a Berlin bull. But he has a far bigger concern than
sharp elbows and supercilious stares, for somewhere in this mix is a cunning
and savage killer who has left a trail of bloody victims. This is no psycho case. This is a man with
motive enough to kill and skills enough to leave no trace of himself. Bad luck
that in this war zone, such skills are two-a-penny. Somehow Bernie must put a
face to this killer before he puts an end to Bernie.
The
Revenant of Thraxton Hall by Vaughn Entwistle (Mar 25th)
Arthur Conan Doyle has just
killed off Sherlock Holmes in “The Final Problem,” and he immediately becomes
one of the most hated men in London. So when he is contacted by a medium “of
some renown” and asked to investigate a murder, he jumps at the chance to get
out of the city. The only thing is that the murder hasn’t happened yet—the
medium, one Hope Thraxton, has foreseen that her death will occur at the third
séance of a meeting of the Society for Psychical Research at her manor house in
the English countryside. Along for the ride is Conan Doyle’s good friend
Oscar Wilde, and together they work to narrow down the list of suspects, which
includes a mysterious foreign Count, a levitating magician, and an irritable
old woman with a “familiar.” Meanwhile, Conan Doyle is enchanted by the plight
of the capricious Hope Thraxton, who may or may not have a more complicated
back-story than it first appears. As Conan Doyle and Wilde participate in
séances and consider the possible motives of the assembled group, the
clock ticks ever closer to Hope’s murder.
For Such a Time by Kate Breslin (Mar 25th)
In 1944, blonde and blue-eyed Jewess Hadassah Benjamin
feels abandoned by God when she is saved from a firing squad only to be handed
over to a new enemy. Pressed into service by SS-Kommandant Colonel Aric von
Schmidt at the transit camp of Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, she is able to
hide behind the false identity of Stella Muller. However, in order to survive
and maintain her cover as Aric's secretary, she is forced to stand by as her
own people are sent to Auschwitz. Suspecting
her employer is a man of hidden depths and sympathies, Stella cautiously
appeals to him on behalf of those in the camp. Aric's compassion gives her
hope, and she finds herself battling a growing attraction for this man she
knows she should despise as an enemy. Stella pours herself into her efforts to keep even some of the camp's prisoners
safe, but she risks the revelation of her true identity with every attempt.
When her bravery brings her to the point of the ultimate sacrifice, she has
only her faith to lean upon. Perhaps God has placed her there for such a time
as this, but how can she save her people when she is unable to save herself?
As a lawyer in a large Manhattan firm, just shy of making
partner, Clementine Evans has finally achieved almost everything she's been
working towards - but now she's not sure it's enough. Her long hours have led
to a broken engagement and, suddenly single at thirty-four, she feels her messy
life crumbling around her. But when the family gathers for her grandmother
Addie's ninety-ninth birthday, a relative lets slip hints about a long-buried
family secret, leading Clemmie on a journey into the past that could change
everything...What follows is a potent story that spans generations and
continents, bringing an Out of Africa feel to a Downton Abbey cast of
unforgettable characters. From the inner circles of WWI-era British society to
the skyscrapers of Manhattan and the red-dirt hills of Kenya, the never-told
secrets of a woman and family unfurl.
Greenwich,1897. A macabre scene is discovered outside a
house on Shooters Hill. There has been a vicious fight, and amid the
bloodstains are locks of long auburn hair. Thomas Pitt, head of Special Branch,
is called: this is the home of Dudley Kynaston, a minister with access to some
of the government's most dangerous secrets, and any inquiry must be handled
with utmost discretion. Although an auburn-haired housemaid is missing from
Kynaston's household, with no evidence there is little Pitt can do. Until a
corpse, mutilated beyond recognition, is discovered a few weeks later. As Pitt
begins to investigate, he finds small inconsistencies in Kynaston's story. Are
these harmless omissions, or could they lead to something more serious,
something that could threaten not just Kynaston's own family but also his Queen
and country?
“You
are now a member of the Guild. There is no return.”Two hundred years
after he was about to die on a Napoleonic battlefield, Nick Falcott,
soldier and aristocrat, wakes up in a hospital bed in modern London. The
Guild, an entity that controls time travel, showers him with life's
advantages. But Nick yearns for home and for one brown-eyed girl, lost
now down the centuries. Then the Guild asks him to break its own rule.
It needs Nick to go back to 1815 to fight the Guild’s enemies and to
find something called the Talisman. In 1815, Julia Percy mourns the
death of her beloved grandfather, an earl who could play with time. On
his deathbed he whispers in her ear: “Pretend!” Pretend what? When Nick
returns home as if from the dead, older than he should be and battle
scarred, Julia begins to suspect that her very life depends upon the
secrets Grandfather never told her. Soon enough Julia and Nick are
caught up in an adventure that stretches up and down the river of time.
As their knowledge of the Guild and their feelings for each other grow,
the fate of the future itself is hanging in the balance.
The Berkeley Square
Affair by Teresa Grant (Mar 25th)
A
stolen treasure may hold the secret to a ghastly crime. . . Ensconced in the comfort of their elegant
home in London's Berkeley Square, Malcolm and Suzanne Rannoch are no longer
subject to the perilous life of intrigue they led during the Napoleonic Wars.
Once an Intelligence Agent, Malcolm is now a Member of Parliament, and Suzanne
is one of the city's most sought-after hostesses. But a late-night visit from a
friend who's been robbed may lure them back into the dangerous world they
thought they'd left behind. . . Playwright
Simon Tanner had in his possession what may be a lost version of Hamlet, and
the thieves were prepared to kill for it. But the Rannochs suspect there's more
at stake than a literary gem--for the play may conceal the identity of a
Bonapartist spy--along with secrets that could force Malcolm and Suzanne to
abandon their newfound peace and confront their own dark past. . .
Magnolia City by Duncan
W. Alderson (Mar 25th)
Houston
in the 1920s is a city of established cotton kings and newly rich oil barons,
where the elite live in beaux art mansions behind the gates of Courtlandt
Place. Kirby Augustus Allen, grandson of the Allen brothers who founded Houston
as a real estate deal, is grooming his daughter Hetty to marry Lamar Rusk,
scion of the Splendora oil fortune. Instead, at the No-Tsu-Oh Carnival of 1928,
beautiful, rebellious Hetty encounters a mysterious man from Montana dressed in
the gear of a wildcatter--an outsider named Garret MacBride. Hetty is torn
between Lamar's lavish courtship and her instinctive connection to Garret. As
Lamar's wife she would be guaranteed acceptance to the highest ranks of Houston
society. Yet Garret, poor but powerfully ambitious, offers the adventure she
craves, with rendezvous in illicit jazz clubs and reckless nights of passion.
The men's intense rivalry extends to business, as rumors of a vast, untapped
ocean of oil in East Texas spark a frenzy that can make fortunes--or shatter
lives and dreams beyond repair.
The Midnight Witch by Paula Brackston (Mar 25th)
Lilith is the daughter of the sixth Duke of
Radnor. She is one of the most beautiful young women in London and engaged to
the city’s most eligible bachelor. She is also a witch. When her father dies,
her hapless brother Freddie takes the title. But it is Lilith, instructed in
the art of necromancy, who inherits their father’s role as Head Witch of the
Lazarus Coven. And it is Lilith who must face the threat of the Sentinels, a
powerful group of sorcerers intent on reclaiming the Elixir from the coven’s
guardianship for their own dark purposes. Lilith knows the Lazarus creed:
secrecy and silence. To abandon either would put both the coven and all she
holds dear in grave danger. She has spent her life honoring it, right down to
her charming fiancé and fellow witch, Viscount Louis Harcourt. Until the day
she meets Bram, a talented artist who is neither a witch nor a member of her
class. With him, she must not be secret and silent. Despite her loyalty to the
coven and duty to her family, Lilith cannot keep her life as a witch hidden
from the man she loves. To tell him will risk everything.
The Spymistress by
Jennifer Chiaverini (in PB Mar 25th)
Born
to slave-holding aristocracy in Richmond, Virginia, and educated by Northern
Quakers, Elizabeth Van Lew was a paradox of her time. When her native state
seceded in April 1861, Van Lew’s convictions compelled her to defy the new
Confederate regime. Pledging her loyalty to the Lincoln White House, her
courage would never waver, even as her wartime actions threatened not only her
reputation, but also her life. Van Lew’s skills in gathering military intelligence
were unparalleled. She helped to construct the Richmond Underground and
orchestrated escapes from the infamous Confederate Libby Prison under the guise
of humanitarian aid. Her spy ring’s reach was vast, from clerks in the
Confederate War and Navy Departments to the very home of Confederate President
Jefferson Davis.
Murder at the Breakers by
Alyssa Maxwell (Mar 25th)
As
the nineteenth century comes to a close, the illustrious Vanderbilt family
dominates Newport, Rhode Island, high society. But when murder darkens a
glittering affair at the Vanderbilt summer home, reporter Emma Cross learns
that sometimes the actions of the cream of society can curdle one's blood. . . Newport, Rhode Island, August 1895: She may
be a less well-heeled relation, but as second cousin to millionaire patriarch
Cornelius Vanderbilt, twenty-one-year-old Emma Cross is on the guest list for a
grand ball at the Breakers, the Vanderbilts' summer home. She also has a job to
do--report on the event for the society page of the Newport Observer. But Emma
observes much more than glitz and gaiety when she witnesses a murder. The
victim is Cornelius Vanderbilt's financial secretary, who plunges off a balcony
faster than falling stock prices. Emma's black sheep brother Brady is found in
Cornelius's bedroom passed out next to a bottle of bourbon and stolen plans for
a new railroad line. Brady has barely come to before the police have arrested
him for the murder. But Emma is sure someone is trying to railroad her brother
and resolves to find the real killer at any cost. . .
The Fortune Hunter by Daisy Goodwin (UK Release Mar 27th)
Empress
Elisabeth 'Sisi' of Austria is famed in her 1865 Winterhalter portrait
depicting her lustrous, long dark hair studded with twenty-seven
sparkling diamond stars, her pale, porcelain skin, her ruby lips and
exquisite poise. Intelligent, beautiful and bored, she decides to leave
her husband, Franz Joseph to his books, and pursue her love of hunting
in a trip to England. It is there, riding with the hunt at Easton
Neston, that she meets Bay Middleton, charismatic, handsome - and as
excellent a rider as she is herself. Sisi is royalty, and married; Bay
is charming, a commoner and betrothed - and his fiancee, Charlotte, is
no fool...Rich in period detail, this is a delicious, playful novel of a
woman bound by her upbringing, and a man who cannot resist breaking
rules.
After their whirlwind romance, Gina and Harry must learn
what it really takes to mesh their families and their cultures. Readers will be
delighted to see exactly how these characters fit into the Bronze Horseman
legacy.
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