Historical Thriller

Fleeing the attentions of the handsome and commanding Marquess of Darkefell, Lady Anne Addison arrives on the doorstep of a dear friend seeking nothing but rest and relaxation, but soon finds herself putting her investigative talents to work after a sighting of the Barbary Ghost. Always a skeptic of the supernatural, Lady Anne immediately suspects the apparition is nothing more than a diversionary tactic to conceal smugglers on the beach below her friend's house.

The Loner didn’t just bust out of jail, he busted out twice. The third time might be the charm — or a bullet in the belly. He didn’t want much — just the chance to drift out of Texas into New Mexico Territory. That’s when the Loner discovered there was a price on his head. A victim of mistaken identity, he broke out of Hell Gate Prison a few years back. Now, he’s behind bars again, until a sheriff’s love-struck daughter decides to come to his aid and a beautiful bounty hunter — who also has eyes for the Loner — joins in.

Mystery novelist Hazel Martin's maid suspects foul play when her childhood friend Doris jumps from the third-story turret of Farnsworth Abbey. Unable to resist an investigation, especially one that's staged to look like suicide, Hazel calls in help from her chauffeur, her cook, and even the mysterious butler her husband hired before his death. Hazel soon learns that Doris's death was no accident. Someone had a secret, and they wanted to keep it that way.

Master and Commander is the first of Patrick O’Brian’s now famous Aubrey-Maturin novels, regarded by many as the greatest series of historical novels ever written. It establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey RN and Stephen Maturin, who becomes his secretive ship’s surgeon and an intelligence agent. It displays the qualities which have put O’Brian far ahead of any of his competitors.

The first book in a brand-new series, The Last Kingdom is set in England during the reign of King Alfred. Uhtred is an English boy, born into the aristocracy of ninth-century Northumbria. Orphaned at 10, he is captured and adopted by a Dane and taught the Viking ways. Yet Uhtred's fate is indissolubly bound up with Alfred, King of Wessex, who rules over the only English kingdom to survive the Danish assault. The struggle between the English and the Danes and the strife between christianity and paganism is the background to Uhtred's growing up.

An exciting, evocative first-in-series noir novel set in 1973 Glasgow, a city on the cusp of a heroin epidemic, featuring detective Harry McCoy. When an 18-year-old boy shoots a young woman dead in the middle of a busy Glasgow street and then commits suicide, McCoy knows it can't be a random act of violence. With a newbie partner in tow, McCoy uses his underworld network to build a picture of a secret society run by Glasgow's wealthiest family, the Dunlops. Drugs, sex, incest; every nefarious predilection is catered to....

A young Saxon boy and his mother are captured in a Viking raid. Fate transforms his destiny and, thanks to an ageing one-armed warrior, he wins his freedom and becomes one with the Vikings. Clan rivalries force Dragonheart and his new Jarl to sail the seas searching for a new home. Landing on the Isle of Man, they must fight for their very survival with enemies old and new seeking their destruction.

The year is 1910. Nate Cooper is an old-school cowboy. He sees the change brought by the turn of the century and reckons none of it to be good. Even after spending nearly 30 years in a Montana prison for a wrongful murder conviction, Nate’s moral compass is true and unwavering: He does all the wrong things for all the right reasons. So when he returns to his northern Montana ranching town to find the Blackfoot Indians - the people he went to prison trying to defend - are still being cheated out of their territory by ranchers, Nate can’t rest on his laurels.

After her father's death, Lizzy Brookstone, the star trick rider of the all-female Brookstone Wild West Extravaganza, loses interest in performing. Ella Fleming is fleeing a forced engagement when she stows away on the Brookstone train. Lizzy finds her and gives her a job in the costume department. When Mary Reichert, a former sharpshooter for the show, learns that her brother, August, has been killed at the Fleming farm, she returns to the show to find the truth, As the three women work together to discover how August died, Lizzy strives to hold the show together.

It has been 12 years since a dark, murderous figure stalked the alleys and courts of Whitechapel. And yet, in the summer of 1900, East London is still poor, still brutal, still a shadow city to its western twin. Among the reformers is an idealistic young woman named India Selwyn-Jones, recently graduated from medical school. With the help of her influential fiance - Freddie Lytton, an up-and-coming Liberal MP - she works to shut down the area's opium dens that destroy both body and soul.

Basil St. Florian is an accomplished agent in the British Army, tasked with dozens of dangerous missions for crown and country across the globe. But his current mission, going undercover in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, might be his toughest assignment yet. He will be searching for an ecclesiastic manuscript that doesn't officially exist, one that genius professor Alan Turing believes may hold the key to a code that could prevent the death of millions and possibly even end the war.

Cotton Pickens made it through fifth grade. That and a tin star were good enough to make him the sheriff in the boomtown of Doubtful, Wyoming. And Doubtful's name is no accident. The saying around town is, "If you're a lawman, it's doubtful you'll last a day." Spoiled, brash King Bragg is going to hang for the murder of three men in a barroom. But King's arrogant father - and his beautiful sister - use their powers of persuasion to convince Cotton to look into the shooting.

The island of Tarawa, a tiny spit of sand out in the middle of the Pacific, teemed with five hundred pillboxes filled with artillery pieces and highly motivated Japanese soldiers. Their commanding officer encouraged his troops, saying, “It would take one million men one hundred years” to conquer Tarawa. They were convinced that the Americans would be slaughtered before they ever got ashore.

Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to deliver an evening lecture in the U.S. Capitol. Within minutes of his arrival, the night takes a bizarre turn. A disturbing object is discovered in the Capitol Building. The object is an ancient invitation, meant to usher its recipient into a long-lost world of hidden esoteric wisdom. And when Langdon's mentor is kidnapped, Langdon's only hope of saving him is to accept this invitation and follow wherever it leads him.

Cantankerous and vinegar-tongued Grandmama, from Anne Perry's Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series, is the leading character in this Christmas novel, which unfolds in the chilly, windswept Romney Marshes off the English Channel. Grandmama arrives on a holiday visit to the home of Charlotte's parents, where a fellow guest--an outcast from her own family--is subsequently murdered. Like the heroes before her in Anne Perry's Christmas novels, Grandmama is called upon to play the role of amateur detective.

As Caesar marches on Rome and panic erupts in the city, Gordianus the Finder discovers, in his own home, the body of Pompey’s favorite cousin. Before fleeing the city, Pompey exacts a terrible bargain from the finder of secrets: to unearth the killer or sacrifice his own son-in-law to service in Pompey’s legions - and certain death. Amid the city’s sordid underbelly, Gordianus learns that the murdered man was a dangerous spy. Now, as he follows a trail of intrigue, betrayal, and ferocious battles on land and sea, the Finder is caught between the chaos of war and the terrible truth he must finally reveal.

The Battle of Britain defined the future for Britain, Europe, and America. Bluebirds tells the story of four ordinary young men who are thrown together as Hitler plunges the European continent into its darkest hours. Andrew Francis and Gerry Donaldson were born on different sides of the Atlantic just before The Great War. Together with the mildly psychotic Bryan Hale, they fly Spitfires through the summer of 1940.

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the US Navy - is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detachment 2702 - commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe - is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. In the present, Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia....

1973. A final, top-secret mission to the Moon. Three astronauts in a tiny module, a quarter of a million miles from home. A quarter of a million miles from help. As Russian and American crews sprint for a secret bounty hidden away on the lunar surface, old rivalries blossom and the political stakes are stretched to breaking point back on Earth. Houston flight controller Kazimieras "Kaz" Zemeckis must do all he can to keep the NASA crew together, while staying one step ahead of his Soviet rivals. But not everyone on board Apollo 18 is quite who they appear to be.

The World at Night is an edge-of-your-seat World War II tale of intrigue and espionage, set in the shadowy back streets and glittering salons of occupied Paris. Film producer Jean Casson, a Paris sophisticate, struggles to come to terms with the uncomfortable realities of life under German occupation, as he becomes caught up in the initial actions of what was to become the French Resistance.