Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in Historical Fiction

Evolutionary biologist Amina Abdul accepts a post-doc in Washington, DC, choosing her career studying hybrid zones over a faltering West Coast romance. Her brother and sister-in-law welcome her to the city, but their marriage is crumbling, and they soon rely on her to keep their son company. Omar, hungry to understand his cultural roots, fakes an Indian accent, invents a royal past, and peppers his aunt with questions about their cultural heritage. When he brings an ornamental knife to school, his expulsion triggers a downward spiral for his family.

Resourceful Bingo Riggs and his partner, Handsome Kusak, are in the sucker-bait business, snapping candid pics of tourists off Central Park. Their fly-by-night enterprise can be irresistible to souvenir lovers, but with one camera in a pawnshop and their developing room in the bathtub of a two-room dump near Hell’s Kitchen, their venture is wretchedly underexposed - until they stumble upon an insurance fraud scheme between the allegedly dead eccentric Mr. S. S. Pigeon and his business partner and beneficiary.

This stunning anthology of classic colonial suspense fiction plunges deep into the native soil from which American horror literature first sprang. While European writers of the Gothic and bizarre evoked ruined castles and crumbling abbeys, their American counterparts looked back to the colonial era’s stifling religion, and its dark and threatening woods.

Tarzan had been betrayed. Drugged and helpless, he was delivered into the hands of the dreadful priests of Opar, last bastion of ancient Atlantis. La, High Priestess of the Flaming God, had saved him once again, driven by her hopeless love for the ape-man. But now, she was betrayed and threatened by her people. To save her, Tarzan fled with her into the legendary Valley of Diamonds, while Jad-bal-ja, his faithful golden lion, followed. Ahead lay a land where savage gorillas ruled over servile men. And behind, Estaban Miranda - who looked exactly like Tarzan - plotted further treachery.

If misfortune hadn’t gotten in the way, Sandra Sanborn would be where she belongs - among the rich and privileged instead of standing outside a Hollywood studio wearing a sandwich board in the hope of someone discovering her. It’s tough breaking into the movies during the Great Depression, but Sandra knows that she’s destined for greatness. After all, her grandmother Vira crossed the country during the Gold Rush and established the Sanborns as one of San Francisco’s most prominent families, and her mother Mabel grew up in a lavish mansion.

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.

Solovetsky occupies the island site of a former monastery in the White Sea. Here, hundreds of miles from civilization, and with a skeleton crew of secret-policemen in charge, some prisoners are consigned to all kinds of forced labor and others sit at comfortable desks in administrative or cultural positions.

1871. After two disastrous marriages, beauty columnist Amalia Truitt’s life is finally her own - well, it will be if she can get herself back to Delaware and demand access to her share of the Truitt family fortune. After all, the charity she’s organized for women who can’t afford their own divorces won’t fund itself. However, not everyone wants her to reach her destination. When her family learns she’s been receiving anonymous death threats, a solo journey is out of the question.

Banking heiress Ursula Nunes has lived her life on the fringes of Philadelphia’s upper class. Her Jewish heritage means she’s never quite been welcomed by society’s elite...and her quick temper has never helped, either. A faux engagement to the scion of the mid-Atlantic’s most storied family might work to repair her rumpled reputation and gain her entrée to the life she thinks she wants…if she can ignore the way her “betrothed” makes her feel warm all over and stay focused on her goal.

How did Hawaii become part of America? This story, inspired by true events suppressed for nearly 100 years, is the one James Michener never wrote. In 1886, Laura Jennings travels to Hawaii to live with missionary relatives. She imagines she’ll live in a grass hut, ministering to uncivilized locals. When she arrives in Honolulu, she’s surprised to find her relatives are among the wealthy elite plotting to overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy. And the Hawaiians have developed a charming and prosperous Victorian kingdom.

Nelson Algren was a renowned writer, known for his penetrating and influential social novels such as The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. Originally published in 1935, Somebody in Boots was Algren’s first novel, based on his experiences living in Texas during the Great Depression. A wonderful companion to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, this new edition of Somebody in Boots features an introduction by Colin Asher, the author of a biography of Algren.

This remarkable novel immerses us in the lives of two women in a small upstate New York town: Frances Thorn, who waits tables, despite her privileged background, and raises her twin daughters without even a memory of their father; and Helle Ten Brix, an elderly Danish composer. At the heart of the two women’s friendship is a Hans Christian Andersen tale about a prideful girl (the subject of Helle’s final opera) who is damned for using a precarious loaf of bread, intended as a gift for her parents, as a stepping stone.

Returning to Catan, Island of the Sun, we find Thorolf ruling with an iron fist as unrest grows among the unfree. Forming the secret Order of the Ravens, they fight to reclaim their futures. When Jora, Thorolf’s headstrong daughter, joins their cause, Thorolf must choose between his power and his family. Asla, Yvngi, and Digur face individual challenges, and as the communities on the island swell and change, their founders must change with them—or be left behind.

Pulitzer prize-winning author David K. Shipler’s fictionalized story of a Vietnamese interpreter, based on his own experiences as a war correspondent, brings back the tensions within Vietnam during the war, focusing on a local with close ties to American journalists and politicians.

Jane Austen’s world meets the Highlands of Scotland in an exciting new, sexy Scottish Regency series by USA Today best-selling author Eliza Knight. Gently bred ladies collide with noble Scottish heroes in these new dramatic and emotionally charged tales of misadventure and love.

1924. May Marshall is determined to spend the dog days of summer in self-imposed exile at her father’s farm in Keswick, Virginia. Following a naive dalliance that led to heartbreak and her expulsion from Mary Baldwin College, May returns home with a shameful secret only to find her father’s orchard is now the site of a lucrative moonshining enterprise. Despite warnings from the one man she trusts - her childhood friend Byrd - she joins her father’s illegal business. When authorities close in and her father, Henry, is arrested, May goes on the run.

Drawn by the promise of adventure and wealth, Titus Bass joins an expedition to Spanish California, where the ranchos have horses and mules in abundance. Their plan is to steal the livestock and drive it back east across the great Mojave Desert to sell to fur traders for top dollar. But pursuit by formidable Mexican soldiers and an attack by fierce Digger Indians take their toll on Bass and his fellow raiders.

The wild and free world of the mountain man is quickly fading into the past. For Titus Bass, leading his family north to winter with the Crow people, the journey is a sad one. He must save an old friend from death and rescue his daughter Magpie from cutthroat traders. He will try to free a wagon train of innocents from its unscrupulous leader, and he will try to come to terms with his long–lost daughter Amanda, bound for a new home in a faraway land Bass himself will never see.

Traveling with his wife and infant daughter, Titus Bass heads north into Crow territory. But what should have been a joyous reunion with his wife’s people turns to tragedy when Bass’s family is kidnapped by the warring Blackfoot. A deadly outbreak of smallpox, brought west by the white man, threatens both Indian nations with annihilation. And another kind of epidemic—this one of greed—brought by two powerful, profit-hungry trading outfits will determine the fate not only of free trappers like Titus Bass—but also the destiny of the entire nation.

He’s one of the most well-known figures in cultures around the world, etched into stained glass, painted in frescoes, even caricatured as standing at the gates of heaven with a long white beard and keys in hand. But long before he was portrayed as a venerated and untouchable figure, Peter was simply known as Simon, a twenty-something fisherman in a far-flung Jewish province controlled by the Roman Empire. You Will Be Peter draws on the four Gospel accounts to weave Simon Peter’s story into one seamless tapestry.