Historical Thriller

Superintendent Thomas Pitt cannot immediately ascertain exactly what segment of society the dead man riding the morning tide of the Thames came from, but the sight of him is unforgettable. Is he, as Pitt fears, a French diplomat who has gone missing? Or merely someone who greatly resembles him?

Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but he was born in 1581. Owing to a rare condition, he’s been alive for centuries. From Shakespeare’s England to Jazz Age Paris to voyaging the Pacific alongside Captain Cook, Tom has seen a lot, and he now craves an ordinary life. Tom now has the perfect cover - working as a history teacher at a London school. Here, he can teach the kids about wars and witch hunts as if he’d never witnessed them first-hand. He can try to tame the past that is catching up with him. The only thing Tom can’t do is fall in love.

It's 1949. When war veteran Aloysius Archer is released from Carderock Prison, he is sent to Poca City on parole with a short list of dos and a much longer list of don'ts: do report regularly to his parole officer, don't go to bars, certainly don't drink alcohol, do get a job - and don't ever associate with loose women. The small town quickly proves more complicated and dangerous than Archer's years serving in the war or his time in jail.

Edinburgh, 1911: When Maud McIntyre and her lady’s maid, Daisy, form a detective agency, they never dream their first case will take place at a glamorous house in the Scottish Highlands. But when the duchess of Duddingston, concerned that a notorious jewelry thief will target her lavish weekend party, employs Maud to go undercover as a guest to find the culprit, the agency has its first case to solve....

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched an attack against U.S. naval forces stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. But what if the Japanese followed up their air assault with an invasion and occupation of Hawaii? This is the question explored by Harry Turtledove in Days of Infamy, with frightening implications.

It’s Mallory Atkinson’s first Christmas in Scotland. Victorian Scotland, that is. Also, as the twenty-first-century detective learns, Christmas really isn’t a thing in Victorian Scotland. It’s all about Hogmanay. But her boss, Dr. Duncan Gray, treats her to an early gift of tickets to the event of the season: a Charles Dickens reading. There, they bump into Lady Inglis—the lovely widow who has sent Gray sexy letters trying to entice him back to her bed.

Anything can happen on Valentine Valley. People recover from amnesia, awake from comas, and rise from the dead - all to the delight of the daytime soap’s millions of fans. But while Valentine Valley may be glamorous onscreen, behind the camera the soap’s grueling production schedule punishes actors, directors, and writers in the name of ratings. Soap star Jennifer Connolly is near her breaking point, and a murderer is about to push her over the edge. As Jennifer struggles to care for her ill mother, a serial killer stalks the lot, committing a gory string of murders inspired by classic Hitchcock films.

In Assault of the Mountain Man, Smoke Jensen’s wife Sally travels to Goth, Colorado, to open a restaurant. There she’s caught in a bloody confrontation prompted by five merciless bank robbers. With the town sheriff sent to the great beyond and Sally clinging to life as a frontier surgeon tries frantically to save her, Smoke is filled with an all-consuming rage - bad news indeed for anyone who opposes him.

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.

Cotton Pickens’s parents had a cussed sense of humor, but there’s nothing funny about the way the man can draw a gun. Now he’s in the middle of a mining camp district slowly being crushed under the iron fist of another misnamed, hardheaded fellow, Carter Scruples. With Cotton facing off against Scruples, a beautiful young woman caught in-between and a band of outlaws living high and mighty in a dry-docked Pullman Palace Car, the town of Swamp Creek is surely going to get blown sky high.

Guadalcanal, the largest island in the Solomons, is being occupied by the Imperial Japanese Navy. As a new airfield nears construction, the United States Navy and Marine Corps know they must act quickly or the entire course of the war could swing in Japan’s favor. As a massive invasion force gathers, Art Turner and the decorated crew of USS Bull Shark are once again sent on a secret mission. The clock is ticking, and Turner, his Marine Raiders, and the Bull Shark herself must face aircraft carriers, marauding Japanese soldiers, and a deadly jungle before time runs out!

It's 1814, and Napoleon is hard-pressed to defend France from a combination of Russia, Prussia, Austria and Britain. Nor is he the only one in a quandary. Matthew Hervey, a young British cornet, is in a rather unusual situation. As far as he knows, it's highly irregular to be arrested on a battlefield after a successful action. Still, it's hardly the first time politics has interrupted war, and as Hervey's career progresses, he increasingly balances both, sometimes more successfully than others!

Wide Is the Gate followed the 1943 Pulitzer Prize-winning Dragon’s Teeth and introduces Lanny as a secret double agent fighting the Nazis as a supporter of the resistance in Germany. Lanny is living in England with his wife of almost five years, Irma Barnes, the twenty-three-million-dollar heiress. But Lanny is conflicted continuously in his heart and soul for the workers and social justice. He attempts to commit to Irma, to “behave” himself and lead a normal aristocratic life.

Elam Eskers lives his days in peace on his ranch in the small town of Phoenix, Oregon, with his ranch hand, Samson, and his dog, Dusk, keeping him company. Gone are the days when he was the man outlaws feared the most. When he doesn't seek trouble, though, it finds him. Quincy Meiner has a hunger for money. He will stop at nothing to steal the land that belongs to Elam and his neighbors. At first, Meiner is just a nuisance. But when the Meiner gang kill Elam's dog, terrorize his town and kidnap Roxanna, the only woman Elam has ever loved, it becomes personal.

Roger Ackroyd knew too much. He knew that the woman he loved had poisoned her brutal first husband. He suspected, also, that someone had been blackmailing her. Then, tragically, came the news that she had taken her own life with a drug overdose. But the evening post brought Roger one last fatal scrap of information. Unfortunately, before he could finish reading the letter, he was stabbed to death.

London, 1899: When a mysterious packet is stolen from a diplomatic courier, Sherlock and Lucy are called upon to recover it before its ominous contents fall into the wrong hands. The Baker Street gang uncovers a dark, tangled web of intrigue and an evil plot that could very well bring all of England to its knees. When a notorious criminal is found dead in the bookstore basement, and the bookseller is arrested for the crime, the danger becomes very real, and very personal. Can Holmes and Lucy find the perilous packet, catch the murderous mastermind, and foil the fiendish plot?

Sir Robert of Offord dies mysteriously just after accusing his new wife of adultery and his son-by-marriage wants the shire's new Crowner to prove the knight was murdered. Instead, Sir Faucon de Ramis discovers that a bell owned by the dead man is missing. But who could have taken it - the daughter who loved it as a child, the knight who wants it as collateral, or the prior who wishes to restore it to its holy purpose of calling the angels? Follow Warwickshire's new Servant of the Crown as Sir Faucon embarks on his most unusual and convoluted hunt yet.

It's the time of year when the immortal army of the ancient king rides Watling Street and the dead become uneasy in their graves. Indeed, in the far north of Warwickshire, the villagers insist that one dead man returned to kill his only son. Now it's up to Sir Faucon de Ramis, the shire's new Crowner, to run the walking corpse to ground and put him back where he belongs.

A long way from Montana Territory, Falcon MacCallister is back east, visiting his family, with Buffalo Bill Cody by his side. When the government asks both men to take a break from being famous to get back to fighting, Falcon and Buffalo Bill head west - into a hornet's nest of trouble. A renegade Indian has followed his vision of bloodshed on a once peaceable territory. A land baron uses the slaughter as an excuse to clear out a valley. And the U.S. Army, trying to keep the peace, is backstabbed by a traitor.

Frank Morgan has one son he knows of - and Kid Morgan has become famous in his own right. But in Montana, Frank comes face-to-face with a young man with a deadly swagger and a stunning claim: that he's Frank's son, too. And he's here to gun his old man down. For Frank, the first thing to do is find out if Brady Morgan is truly his own flesh and blood. That means tracking down a woman he once loved, and then untangling her lies, lust and a scheme to steal prime Montana ranch land.