Historical Mystery Thriller

This tale begins with Jack Aubrey arriving home from his exploits in the Mediterranean to find England at peace following the Treaty of Amiens. He and his friend Stephen Maturin, surgeon and secret agent, begin to live the lives of country gentlemen, hunting, entertaining, and enjoying amorous adventures. Their comfortable existence, however, is cut short when Jack is overnight reduced to a pauper with enough debts to keep him in prison for life. He flees to the continent to seek refuge.

Autumn 1888. Veronica Speedwell and her colleague Stoker are asked by Lady Wellingtonia Beauclerk to stop a potential scandal so explosive it threatens to rock the monarchy. Prince Albert Victor is a regular visitor to the most exclusive private club in London, and the proprietress, Madame Aurore, has received an expensive gift that can be traced back to the prince. Lady Wellie would like Veronica and Stoker to retrieve it from the club before scandal can break.

Spring, 1549. Two years after the death of Henry VIII, England is sliding into chaos...The king, Edward VI, is 11 years old. His uncle Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, rules as Protector. Radical Protestants are conducting all-out war on the old religion, stirring discontent among the people. The Protector's prolonged war with Scotland is proving a disastrous failure. Worst of all, the economy is in collapse, inflation rages, and rebellion is stirring among the peasantry.

The Carolinas, 1699: The citizens of Fount Royal believe a witch has cursed their town with inexplicable tragedies -- and they demand that beautiful widow Rachel Howarth be tried and executed for witchcraft. Presiding over the trial is traveling magistrate Issac Woodward, aided by his astute young clerk, Matthew Corbett. Believing in Rachel's innocence, Matthew will soon confront the true evil at work in Fount Royal....

Lucy Harrington has returned to Kurland St. Mary to help with her friend Sophia Giffin's wedding. But her homecoming is made disagreeable by the presence of Major Robert Kurland, whose bungled proposal has ruffled Lucy's composure, and a meddling widow who has designs on her father, the village rector. Wary of the cloying Mrs. Chingford from the start, Lucy has doubts about the busybody's intentions with her father. But everyone else seems to think they make an ideal match—until the courtship is curtailed when Mrs. Chingford is found dead at the bottom of a staircase.

The Christmas season brings strange guests to the medieval nunnery of St. Frideswide's. They bear with them the badly mangled body of a villager, swearing they found the drunken fool lying in a ditch. But Meg, the victim's wife and a scullery maid of the cloister, thinks there are far fouler deeds afoot. As the players rehearse for the nativity, ancient scandals lick at their heels and dark desperation haunts Meg's steps as she finds cruel feudal laws threatening to strip away the lands that would support both her and her sons in the wake of her husband's death.

From the best-selling author of Before We Were Yours comes a dramatic historical novel of three young women searching for family amid the destruction of the post-Civil War South, and of a modern-day teacher who learns of their story and its vital connection to her students’ lives.

Young Queen Elizabeth II is finding her way in postwar Europe, trying to repair friendships with foreign governments. Advised by her father's old courtiers, the Queen suspects that they may not have her best interests at heart. One of them is trying to sabotage her public appearances: that much she is sure of. When two bodies turn up in Chelsea, the Queen finds herself unwillingly used as the alibi for somebody very close to her. With the reputation of the monarchy at stake, Elizabeth knows she can't face these challenges alone.

Automne 1830, dans un Paris fiévreux encore sous le choc des Journées révolutionnaires de juillet, le gouvernement de Louis-Philippe, nouveau roi des Français, tente de juguler une opposition divisée mais virulente. Valentin Verne, jeune inspecteur du service des mœurs, est muté à la brigade de Sûreté fondée quelques années plus tôt par le fameux Vidocq. Il doit élucider une série de morts étranges susceptible de déstabiliser le régime. Car la science qui progresse, mêlée à l'ésotérisme alors en vogue, inspire un nouveau type de criminalité.

On the rolling Missouri River, a riverboat of fur traders, a US senator, and Prussian royalty are all heading to the Yellowstone from St. Louis. Preacher's onboard because the nation's fate depends on the passengers landing safe and sound. But it won't be easy.

Après lui, l'Apocalypse... La prophétie de Malachie, la vision de Pie X et l'annonce faite par Marie aux jeunes bergers de Fátima, ne pourraient être plus claires : le pape actuel sera le dernier de l'histoire des hommes. Le souverain pontife lui-même en est persuadé. Requis par le Saint-Siège à propos d'une sombre histoire de documents volés, l'historien Tomás Noronha accorde peu de foi à ces élucubrations. L'enlèvement du Saint-Père, le soir même, le détrompera. Quant aux caves du Vatican, elles recèlent plus d'un Judas... Et plus d'un coin d'ombre.

As newspapers reported in the 1890s, a woman dubbed "Shakespeare" was found dead in a seedy hotel along the waterfront by Manhattan’s South Street Seaport. The chilling scene recalled for press and police alike Jack the Ripper’s victims in London. Panicked New Yorkers worked feverishly to halt that maniac’s spree from expanding across the Atlantic. The city only sighed relief after detectives abruptly arrested a traveling Algerian ex-soldier for the crime.

After Culloden, Iain MacGillivray was left for dead on Drumossie Moor. Wounded, his face brutally slashed, he survived only by pretending to be dead as the Redcoats patrolled the corpses of his Jacobite comrades. Six years later, with the clan chiefs routed and the Highlands subsumed into the British state, Iain lives a quiet life, working as a bookseller in Inverness. One day, after helping several of his regular customers, he notices a stranger lurking in the upper gallery of his shop, poring over his collection. But the man refuses to say what he's searching for.

It’s the eve of 1953, and Aloysius Archer is in Los Angeles to ring in the New Year with an old friend, aspiring actress Liberty Callahan, when their evening is interrupted by an acquaintance of Callahan’s: Eleanor Lamb, a screenwriter in dire straits. After a series of increasingly chilling events—mysterious phone calls, the same blue car loitering outside her house, and a bloody knife left in her sink—Eleanor fears that her life is in danger, and she wants to hire Archer to look into the matter. Archer suspects that Eleanor knows more than she’s saying.

Raymond Bannister is a wealthy man living a secure life, but the day that he receives a single slipper in an envelope his world falls apart. He seeks out a place in the bad part of town—is he looking for his own demise? He is found slashed down in a dirty alleyway. The crime and the crime scene are inexplicable to Lestrade, and he seeks the help of his new consultant detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. This beginning will lead us back in time, to India, and it will lead us to the strange origin of a group of children that call themselves the Irregulars.

San Francisco, 1906. In a city bustling with newly minted millionaires and scheming upstarts, two very different women hope to change their fortunes: Gemma, a golden-haired, silver-voiced soprano whose career desperately needs rekindling, and Suling, a petite and resolute Chinatown embroideress who is determined to escape an arranged marriage. Their paths cross when they are drawn into the orbit of Henry Thornton, a charming railroad magnate whose extraordinary collection of Chinese antiques includes the fabled Phoenix Crown, a legendary relic of Beijing’s fallen Summer Palace.

On the evening of March 9, 1566, David Rizzio, the private secretary of Mary, Queen of Scots, was brutally murdered. Dragged from the chamber of the heavily pregnant Mary, Rizzio was stabbed 56 times by a party of assassins. This breathtakingly tense novella dramatizes the events that led up to that night, telling the infamous story as it has never been told before.

London, 1885. In a city of fog and darkness, the notorious thief Edward Shade exists only as a ghost, a fabled con, a thief of other men's futures - a man of smoke. William Pinkerton is already famous, the son of a brutal detective, when he descends into the underworld of Victorian London in pursuit of a new lead. His father died without ever tracing Shade; William, still reeling from his loss, is determined to drag the thief out of the shadows. What follows is a fog-enshrouded hunt through sewers, opium dens, drawing rooms, and seance halls.

It's early 1938, and Maisie Dobbs is back in England. On a fine yet chilly morning, as she walks toward Fitzroy Square - a place of many memories - she is intercepted by Brian Huntley and Robert MacFarlane of the Secret Service. The German government has agreed to release a British subject from prison, but only if he is handed over to a family member. Because the man's wife is bedridden and his daughter has been killed in an accident, the Secret Service wants Maisie - who bears a striking resemblance to the daughter - to retrieve the man from Dachau....

Bo Creel is back at his family's Star C Ranch in Bear Creek, Texas. Along with his buddy Scratch, he's finding out that home is where the hell-raising is. A rival ranch is trying to drive the Creel family out of business, using any means necessary. For Bo, Scratch, and Bo's nephew Lee, always suckers for a pretty face, come three ladies. Two to melt hearts and one to blur the battle lines between the ranches. Desperate to raise cash and save the Star C, the Creels set out on a cattle drive to the Gulf of Mexico.