English Historical Fiction

Once every year, Perley Gates and his brothers lead the Triple-G crew on its annual cattle drive. It's a treacherous journey along the Great Western Trail, with a herd of 2,000 cows on one side and many opportunities for trouble on the other. This year, trouble shows up in the form of a beautiful young woman, her little baby, and her bizarre traveling companion - a colorful old cuss who goes by the name of Possom Smith. They're heading to a settlement called Butcher Bottom, and risking their necks to get there. Perley offers to escort the trio to their destination.

When Inspector Shanti de Silva moves with his English wife, Jane, to his new post in the sleepy hill town of Nuala, he anticipates a more restful life than police work in the big city entails. However an arrogant plantation owner with a lonely wife, a crusading lawyer, and a death in suspicious circumstances present him with a riddle that he will need all his experience to solve. Set on the exotic island of Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) in the 1930s, Trouble in Nuala is an entertaining and absorbing mystery spiced with humor and a colorful cast of characters.

In the extraordinary Worldwar tetralogy, set against the backdrop of World War II, Harry Turtledove, whom Publishers Weekly has called the "Hugo-winning master of alternate SF," wove an explosive saga of world powers locked in conflict against an enemy from the stars.

When Maddie Fraser's father was killed fighting for Bonnie Prince Charles, the spirited Scottish lass swore to avenge his death. Hooded and disguised, she led a series of daring raids against the forces of the Crown - vowing to love no man until the English invaders were driven from her native soil.

It is 1969 and Glasgow is in the grip of the worst winter in decades, yet it is something else that has Glaswegians on edge: a serial killer whose name alone is enough to make them tremble with fear. The Quaker has killed another victim, snatching a young woman from a nightclub and dumping her body like trash in the back of a cold-water tenement. He leaves no clues, and the investigation has led police down one blind alley after another.

Random, Colorado, is just another stop on the road for solitary gunslinger Gabriel Valance. Known for his drinking, gambling, and womanizing, he prefers to remain a stranger to anyone who crosses his path. But when an upstart gunslinger catches Gabe off guard and shoots him down, he regrets his empty, lonely life with his dying breath....

A lovely American actress awakens in London on a cold morning in 1897 - lying face down on the concrete pavement outside the British Museum. She has no memories. She does not even know who she is, although she has a vague recollection of the name Sherlock Holmes. What she believes is that she has may have just killed someone, and that someone is definitely trying to kill her. As she searches for clues to her true identity, she will learn that she is not the only target.

Lavan Chitward is a very unhappy young man; pulled away from his country home by his parents' ambitions and resettled in the big city of Haven, he is desperately lonely, bullied and beaten at school, ignored by his parents. It is not surprising that he falls ill - but his illness is the first manifestation of a terrible power, the Gift of the Firestorm, a power which can and does kill. If controlled, the Gift of the Firestorm can save Valdemar, but if it is uncontrolled, it will destroy the country - and him.

It happens in an instant. One minute, Charlotte Tarrant is traveling across Cornwall in her luxurious coach. The next, shots ring out and her carriage goes over a cliff's edge. As she clings to the rocks, a savior appears. When they meet again, Charley recognizes him instantly. But she doesn't yet realize that the stranger who saved her life - the handsome aristocrat who now vies for her hand in marriage - is England's most notorious spy.

When her father auctions her off to pay his gambling debts, Melissa Seacourt vows that she will be no man's bought bride. Desperate to escape her fate shackled to someone she could never love, Melissa instead is forced to honor and obey the seductive stranger who comes to her rescue.

Deputy US Marshal Jeremiah Halstead is escorting notorious outlaw John Hudson across the territory for trial when he's ambushed by a pack of Hudson's men anxious to rescue their partner from his custody. Halstead puts the blast on them, but outnumbered and outgunned, he has little choice but to hole up in an old mining town known as Silver Cloud, Montana. It's a place where he can keep a lock on his prisoner while figuring out how to get past Hudson's gang alive. But the folks in Silver Cloud are none too happy playing host to the lawman or his kill-crazy prisoner.

The story is set in the Ptolemaic era of ancient Egyptian history and revolves around the survival of a dynasty bloodline protected by the priesthood of Isis. The main character, Harmachis (the living descendant of this bloodline), is charged by the priesthood with overthrowing the supposed impostor - Cleopatra - driving out the Romans, and restoring Egypt to its golden era.

For over a century, the town of Gossamer Grove has thrived on its charm and midwestern values, but Annalise Forsythe knows painful secrets, including her own, hover just beneath the pleasant facade. When a man is found dead in his run-down trailer home, Annalise inherits the trailer, along with the pictures, vintage obituaries, and old revival posters covering its walls. A century earlier, Gossamer Grove has been stirred into chaos by the arrival of controversial and charismatic twin revivalists, and Libby Sheffield, working at her father's newspaper, receives an obituary for a reputable church deacon hours before his death.

After losing his betrothed, Ceana, to a Lowlander, Laird Gabriel MacKinnon is charged with saving her cousin along with a brood of children from an impenetrable castle. Though the lady he's been tasked with protecting has been accused of a heinous crime, Gabriel has no fear of her. In fact he's a little irritated at the prospect of delivering her to her kin. But this hardened, cold warrior just may find his heart melting, for the hellion brings out a passionate side he'd thought long buried.

An atmospheric debut novel set on the gritty streets of Victorian London, Some Danger Involved introduces detective Cyrus Barker and his assistant, Thomas Llewelyn, as they work to solve the gruesome murder of a young scholar in London's Jewish ghetto. When the eccentric and enigmatic Barker takes the case, he must hire an assistant, and out of all who answer an ad for a position with "some danger involved", he chooses downtrodden Llewelyn, a gutsy young man with a murky past.

Lady Gwyn Drake has long protected her family's reputation by hiding an imprudent affair from her youth. But when her former suitor appears at Armitage Hall, manhandling the heiress and threatening to go public with her secrets, it's Gwyn who needs protecting. Her twin brother, Thorn, hires Joshua Wolfe, the estate's gamekeeper, to keep her safe in London during her debut. As a war hero, Joshua feels obligated to fulfill the assignment he has accepted. But as a man, it's torment to be so very close to the beauty he's fought to ignore....

Men are optional. That's the credo Emma Chandler's suffragette aunts preached and why she started a successful women's colony in Harper's Station, Texas. But when an unknown assailant tries repeatedly to drive them out, Emma admits they might need a man after all. A man who can fight - and she knows just the one.

For Hudson, the newly titled Viscount Stildon, moving to England from India where he was born and raised was already an arduous enough endeavor. When he learns the fate of the racing empire he inherited along with his title depends upon him getting in the good graces of another stable owner, he's even more at a loss. The stable at the neighboring estate has been Miss Bianca Snowley's refuge for years, and when a strange man appears to be stealing the horses, she jumps to their protection without a second thought.

Newly widowed and desperate to protect her estate and beloved servants from her malevolent brother-in-law, Martha Russell conceives a daring plan. Or rather, a daring plan to conceive. After all, if she has an heir on the way, her future will be secured. Forsaking all she knows of propriety, Martha approaches her neighbor, a London exile with a wicked reputation, and offers a strictly business proposition: a month of illicit interludes... for a fee.

For the first time, an epic account of a boy born into a struggle for survival on the harsh and unforgiving American frontier, the story behind the legend of Smoke Jensen.... On the eve of the Civil War, Kirby Jensen is the youngest of three children living on a hardscrabble ranch in Southwestern Missouri. But in 1861, shots were fired in Charleston harbor, and Kirby's father and brother went to war.