Historical Thriller

Scholar Richard Sabyn, a particularly obnoxious fellow, was believed to have been struck by lightning. However, Master Wycliffe believes otherwise and calls upon Sir Hugh de Singleton for help. Sir Hugh shares Wycliffe’s suspicions and launches a private investigation, learning that it might indeed be possible to make it look as though a man has died from a lightning strike. But who would go to all that effort, and why?

In the town of 34 Corners, Colorado, Matt Jensen rides into a savage blood feud. Thirty years ago two friends came West and built a thriving cattle business. Now, their families have become kill-crazy enemies and the town is awash in a frenzy of killing. Add in hired gunmen on both sides of the fight, and two lovers crossing the dividing line, and the terror will never end. Eager to put as many miles between himself and 34 Corners, Matt Jensen just can't bring himself to leave without trying to stop the bloodshed.

On the American frontier, every gun tells a story. A boy in Texas waits for a Christmas present he chose from a Montgomery Ward catalog. The present, a brand new, lever action Winchester 1886 and a box of its big .50-caliber slugs, never makes it there. Instead, the rifle is caught up in a train robbery and starts a long and violent journey of its own - from the hands of a notorious, kill-crazy outlaw to an Apache renegade to a hardscrabble rancher and beyond.

In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive.

If there's anything better than coming home to Texas, it's getting paid to do it. For Scratch Morton and Bo Creel, always on the hunt for funds, the job is taking three vicious criminals from Arkansas to Tyler, Texas for trial. Little do they know that one of the criminals, the one that's a beautiful woman, is the most dangerous of all. Soon the journey home turns into a race for buried treasure, a shoot-out, and another double cross - until Scratch and Bo are making one last mad, bullet-sprayed dash through the land of their birth...or the land of their death....

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.

1920. Poppy Denby, an aspiring journalist, arrives in London to look after her ailing Aunt. She encourages Poppy to apply for a job at The Daily Globe, but on her first day, a senior reporter is killed and Poppy is tasked with finishing his story. It involves the mysterious death of a suffragette seven years earlier - an event some powerful people would prefer forgotten....

Set in 1944 Chicago, Edgar Award-winner Naomi Hirahara’s eye-opening and poignant new mystery, the story of a young woman searching for the truth about her revered older sister's death, brings to focus the struggles of one Japanese-American family released from mass incarceration at Manzanar during World War II.

John Lawton's A Lily of the Field is a brilliant historical thriller from a master of the form. The book follows two characters - Meret Voytek, a talented young cellist living in Vienna at the novel's start, and Dr. Karel Szabo, a Hungarian physicist interned in a camp on the Isle of Man. In his seventh Inspector Troy novel, Lawton moves seamlessly from Vienna and Auschwitz to the deserts of New Mexico and the rubble-strewn streets of postwar London, following the fascinating parallels of the physicist Szabo and musician Voytek as fate takes each far from home.

Attorney Cameron Thorne is thrust into a bloody tug-of-war involving secret societies, treasure hunters, and keepers of the secrets of the Jesus bloodline. Joined by Amanda, an enchanting British researcher with secrets of her own, Cam races around New England with only two choices - unravel the 600-year-old mysteries encoded in the ancient artifacts, or die trying.

A band of outlaws attacks an English manor in the dead of night. The bloody trail leads to the dark heart of Sherwood Forest, and Richard is certain that his old enemy, William de Ferrers, has returned. But England is in turmoil. The barons have erupted into armed rebellion against King John, and a French army has invaded the south, seeking to crown a French prince as the King of England. Richard must do his duty to save England. But he must also journey deep into Sherwood to destroy William and rescue the Lady Marian before she is devoured or turned.

Caressa Horvath, raised in the corrupting atmosphere of a traveling carnival, marries an anthropologist named Jacob Bowman, who takes her on a journey to North Africa. Jacob gets himself killed by a band of Bedouin who spare Caressa’s life. The only one of her party left alive, Caressa is forced to join the caravan on a harrowing journey across the African desert.

When mystery novelist Hazel Martin receives a secretive letter from an old friend who suspects her relatives have murderous intentions, she packs her bags and heads to the country. Tampered medications, symptoms of poisoning, and suspicious accidents all add up to attempted murder, and it's up to Hazel and her Siamese cat, Dickens, to sniff out the clues. But with a house full of relatives who all have a motive, will Hazel be able to unmask the culprit before things turn deadly?

On a spring evening in 1140 Shrewsbury, the midnight matins at the Benedictine abbey suddenly reverberate with an unholy sound—a hunt in full cry. Pursued by a drunken mob, the quarry is running for its life. When the frantic creature bursts in to claim sanctuary, Brother Cadfael finds himself fighting off armed townsmen to save a terrified young man

In this tense, riveting mind game, New York Times bestselling novelist Nelson DeMille delivers a suspenseful short story in the tradition of his classic military novels The General's Daughter and Word of Honor. A band of soldiers in its last month of service in Vietnam goes out on a patrol through enemy territory with a female sniper in its path. Recounting the mission in shattering and sometimes gruesome detail, DeMille creates a concise masterpiece of moody suspense.

With a college diploma safely in hand, 20-year-old Thomas Ollenburger is torn between his Mennonite roots on the Kansas prairie and his affluent life in Boston society - and by romantic entanglements in each world. And now even Heaven seems deaf to questions about his choices of vocation, wife, and home.

Worcester, 1888. Nicholas Evelyn, the elderly cathedral librarian, has disappeared. A priceless medieval manuscript has been stolen. Its glass case smashed with a candlestick. Ravenscroft is sent from the grimy streets of Whitechapel to investigate. Aided by his trusty companion Constable Tom Crabb, Ravenscroft soon discovers that behind the cathedral’s facade lurks a dark world of death and deceit. Could the murder relate to an unsolved mystery dating back nearly 40 years?

Fred Underhill is a young cop on the rise in Los Angeles in the early 1950s - a town blinded to its own grime by Hollywood glitter; a society nourished by newspaper lies that wants its heroes all-American and squeaky clean. A chance to lead on a possible serial killing is all it takes to fuel Underhill's reckless ambition - and it propels him into a dangerous alliance with certain mad and unstable elements of the law enforcement hierarchy. When the case implodes with disastrous consequences, it is Fred Underhill who takes the fall. His life is in ruins, his promising future suddenly a dream of the past.

Dedicating a monument to an eminent member of a Cambridge college should be a simple matter of course, but despite already commissioning an artist to complete the work, the meddling daughter of the deceased is determined to enlist her own sculptor to create the statue. It's convenient for her, then, when the university's chosen candidate turns up dead...Felix Smythe and Professor Cedric Dillworthy, a benefactor to the project, are invited to Cambridge to participate in the preparations. Unbeknownst to them, Rosy Gilchrist is also there, attending a reunion at Newnham College.

Warlock Holmes may have demons in his head, but now Dr. John Watson has a mummy in his bloodstream. Specifically that of the sorcerer Xantharaxes, who when shredded and dissolved in an 8 percent solution, results in some extremely odd but useful prophetic dreams. There's also the small matter of Watson falling for yet another damsel-du-jour, and Warlock deciding that his companion needs some domestic bliss....