Historical Women

This companion tale tells the story of Ruth, the daughter that Rachel Kalama - quarantined for most of her life at an isolated leprosy settlement - was forced to give up at birth. The book follows young Ruth from her arrival at the Kapi'olani Home for Girls in Honolulu to her adoption by a Japanese couple who raise her on a strawberry and grape farm in California, her marriage and unjust internment at Manzanar Relocation Camp during World War II - and then, after the war, to the life-altering day when she receives a letter from a woman who says she is Ruth’s birth mother.

Lady Euphemia Marlington hasn't been free in 17 years - since she was captured by Corsairs and sold into a harem. Now the sultan is dead and Mia is back in London facing relentless newspapermen, an insatiably curious public, and her first Season. Worst of all is her ashamed father's ultimatum: marry a man of his choosing or live out her life in seclusion. No doubt her potential groom is a demented octogenarian. Fortunately, Mia is no longer a girl, but a clever woman with a secret - and a plan of her own....

When a young woman predicts a murder, she finds herself the center of a witch hunt....1790, England: When Lord Francis and Lady Ottilia Fanshawe's coach breaks down, they find themselves stranded in the village of Witherley. But Ottilia, the intrepid "Lady Fan," finds her curiosity piqued when she hears of a local murder. A young woman predicted the gruesome death of the village blacksmith. And he was killed exactly as described....Is the young woman predicting the future? Are the villagers right to call her a witch? Or is there an even more sinister explanation?

The Dowager Lady Worthington isn't quite sure what to make of country-girl Dorothea Stern. As the granddaughter of the Duke of Bristol, Dotty is schooled in the ways and means of the nobility. But her sharp wit and outspoken nature has everyone in a tizzy. Especially their cousin, Dominic, the Marquis of Merton. Prematurely stuffy, Dom was raised by his cheerless uncle to be wary of a host of things, including innovation, waltzing, and most perilous of all: true love. Still, there's something about Dotty, beyond her beauty, that Dom cannot resist.

A sheltered life in the countryside has left Diana Lindsay restless to see the wider world, for both herself and the son she is raising alone. She cannot marry, but perhaps as a courtesan she will find love and protection despite her painful past. Gathering her courage, she moves to London - and finds herself the city's most desired woman, as admired for her charm as for her beauty. But it is one man who captivates her - handsome, haunted, and harboring a secret as deep as her own....

Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear. The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader.

Sixteen years ago, Princess Halla of Yshrem saved the life of an eight-year-old barbarian boy and watched her kingdom fall to ruin, all on the same day. Now, she is a forgotten spinster in a quiet temple, living her days out in solitude. The last of her line, she exists in the hope that she has been forgotten, for to be remembered by the enemy is to be certain death. One person has not forgotten her. Mathior, now 24, is the fierce warrior king of the Cyclopae. Yshrem is in turmoil and his advisors have a suggestion - kill the last remaining member of the royal line.

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.

The indomitable Amelia Peabody and her husband, known to many as "the Father of Curses", are into archaeology and mischief again. This third in the series brings the reader once more into Egypt and the shady world of black market antiquities. The winter excavation season has hardly yet begun when Amelia stumbles onto what looks suspiciously like a ring of thieves.

England, 1364: When married off at aged twelve to an elderly farmer, brazen redheaded Eleanor quickly realizes it won’t matter what she says or does, God is not on her side—or any poor woman’s for that matter. But then again, Eleanor was born under the joint signs of Venus and Mars, making her both a lover and a fighter.

The incomparable Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut wrote that she had the luck “always to stumble in on the real show.” Married to a high-ranking member of the Confederate government, she was ideally placed to watch and to record the South’s headlong plunge to ruin, and she left in her journals an unsurpassed account of the old regime’s death throes, its moment of high drama in world history. With intelligence and passion she described the turbulent events of politics and war, as well as the complex society around her.

In the snowbound city of Kiev, wry and bookish history student Mila Pavlichenko organizes her life around her library job and her young son—but Hitler’s invasion of Russia sends her on a different path. Given a rifle and sent to join the fight, Mila must forge herself from studious girl to deadly sniper—a lethal hunter of Nazis known as Lady Death. When news of her three hundredth kill makes her a national heroine, Mila finds herself torn from the bloody battlefields of the eastern front and sent to America on a goodwill tour.

One of seven children of a high-ranking government official, Loung Ung lived a privileged life in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh until the age of five. Then, in April 1975, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into the city, forcing Ung's family to flee and, eventually, to disperse. Loung was trained as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans, her siblings were sent to labor camps, and those who survived the horrors would not be reunited until the Khmer Rouge was destroyed.

Elizabeth was not just Queen, she was ruler. In an age of male supremacy she, by sheer force of character, became not only the unchallenged leader of the English but also the first leader of an empire upon which the sun never set. Erickson’s biography tells the truth about this extraordinary woman and profiles some amazing people - their personalities and culture.

It is November 25, 1960, and the bodies of three beautiful, convent-educated sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. El Caribe, the official newspaper, reports their deaths as an accident. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of General Raphael Leonidas Trujillo's dictatorship.

It is 1936, and Nancy Wake is an intrepid Australian expat living in Paris who has bluffed her way into a reporting job for Hearst newspaper when she meets the wealthy French industrialist Henri Fiocca. No sooner does Henri sweep Nancy off her feet and convince her to become Mrs. Fiocca than the Germans invade France and she takes yet another name: a code name. As Lucienne Carlier, Nancy smuggles people and documents across the border and earns a new nickname from the Gestapo for her remarkable ability to evade capture: The White Mouse.

April 1928: Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher is visited in London by her young cousins. On the list of must-see sites is the Crystal Palace. Discovering that her children's nanny, Nanny Gilpin, has never seen the Palace, Daisy decides to make a day of it - bringing her cousins, her three-year-old twins, her step-daughter Belinda, the nurserymaid, and Nanny Gilpin. Yet this ordinary outing goes wrong when Mrs. Gilpin goes off to the ladies room and fails to return. When Daisy goes to look for her, she doesn't find her nanny but instead the body of another woman dressed in a nanny's uniform.

Lucy James and Sherlock Holmes must solve a mysterious locked-room murder at London's exclusive Diogenes Club. But Lucy is still coping with the traumatic after-effects of their last case, and her romantic relationship with a handsome young police detective is growing more complex. Emotions intensify and the dangers become life-threatening as they find themselves drawn into lethal conflict with the most ruthless gang leader in London.

For years now, readers of the Russell Memoirs have wondered about the tantalizing mentions of Japan. Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes had spent three weeks there, between India ( The Game) and San Francisco ( Locked Rooms). The time has finally come to tell that story. It is 1925, and Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes arrive home to find...a stone. A stone with a name, which they last saw in the Tokyo garden of the future emperor of Japan.

In the fair autumn of Our Lord's grace 1431, the nuns of England's St. Frideswide's prepare for the simply ceremonies in which the saintly novice Thomasine will take her holy vows. But their quiet lives of beauty and prayer are thrown into chaos by the merciless arrival of Lady Ermentrude Fenner and her retinue of lusty men, sinful women, and baying hounds. The hard-drinking dowager even keeps a pet monkey for her amusement. She demands wine, a feast.... And her niece, the angelic Thomasine.