Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Historical Fiction

When Thomas Edison asks for information, most feel compelled to give it. Not University of Washington professor Benjamin Bradshaw. Not when the question concerns a device conceived in anger and harnessed for murder. Bradshaw hopes the mysterious invention remains lost in Elliott Bay, eluding the search of deep-sea divers.

Murder is unthinkable to the People - a Paleolithic tribe migrating across Alaska and becoming some of the first undocumented immigrants to enter the Americas. For them, murder isn't merely tragic, it's forbidden. Murder poisons the entire tribe and puts it at odds with nature, the Spirits, and the mighty Earth Mother. A murderer must be found and removed in order to put the world back in balance.

In the summer of 1916, a big twister brings destruction to the land around Boynton, Oklahoma. Alafair Tucker's family and neighbors are not spared the ruin and grief spread by the storm. But no one is going to mourn for Jubal Beldon, who made it his business to know the ugly secrets of everyonei n town. It doesn't matter if Jubal's insinuations are true or not. In a small town like Boynton, rumor is as damaging as fact.

A debutante's missing body, murder most foul, and weird spectrallights in the fog make for a thrilling gas light-era tale of mystery and detection. In 1895 San Francisco young debutantes don't commit suicide at festive parties, particularly not under the eye of Sabina Carpenter. But Virginia St. Ives evidently did, leaping from a foggy parapet in a shimmer of ghostly light.

A newly minted graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in 1890, Dr. Thomas Parks heads to the big timber country of Puget Sound to practice trauma medicine. An hour after stepping off the boat, he's nearly crushed to death by a less-than-sure-footed mule and finds himself a patient rather than a physician. As he convalesces, he discovers that his host, a venerable physician friend of his father's, is running an elaborate medical scam, selling worthless concoctions nationwide, with enormous sales.

It would seem that the end of every war has been followed inthe United States by social and moral changes, mostly for the worse. Zane Greycertainly felt that way about the effects of the Great War, and to show thesechanges and how to cope with them became the impulse behind what he called TheWater Hole. However, before magazine publication, changes were made in histext, including the names of all the characters. Fortunately Grey's originalhandwritten manuscript has survived, so now this story can be told with hischaracters named and presented as he intended them to be.

In 1925 widowed businessman Elijah Winters brings hisdaughter, Cherry, from Long Island to stay at a trading post in a remote areasome distance from Flagstaff, Arizona. Removed from the country clubs andspeakeasies, Cherry is at first bored with simple ranch life, and to entertainherself she flirts with several of the cowboys, not realizing they are verydifferent from the young men she knew back east. Also very different is StephenHeftral, a young archaeologist who is searching for an ancient and lost kiva ofa primitive Indian tribe that disappeared centuries before in what became theland of the Navajos.

Heftral believes that this lost kiva is most probablyin a desert fastness called Beckyshibeta, the Navajo word for waterhole. Elijah colludes with Heftral to awaken Cherry to a new and healthier wayof life by taking her, by force if necessary, to the site. Cherry resents being kidnapped but comes to forget theluxury of her past in the beauty and dangers of the canyons - and in the thrillof making an important archaeological discovery.

March, 1944: US Army Lieutenant Billy Boyle, back in England after a dangerous mission in Italy, is due for a little R&R, and also a promotion. But the now-Captain Boyle doesn't get to kick back and enjoy his leisure time because two upsetting cases fall into his lap at once.

Budapest, 1956. In the darkest year of Hungary's modern history, a national uprising against Soviet occupiers and their reign of terrorist underway. Eleven-year-old Évike and her firebrand mother steal deep into battle zones in support of civilian freedom fighters, armed only with primitive weapons and desperate courage against the heavy artillery of trained Russian troops.

Summer 1880. The railroad is coming west, all the way to Leadville, Colorado, and its rich Rocky Mountain mines - and millionaires. Coming to celebrate the arrival of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad is a former president, none other than Ulysses S. Grant, eighteenth president of the United States and commander of the Union armies during the Civil War. But not everyone wants to celebrate the arrival of the railroad.

As part owner of the Silver Queen Saloon, Inez Stannert has observed the ruination that comes from yielding to temptation. Still, that knowledge hasn't stopped her from striking a backroom deal with upscale brothel madam Frisco Flo - a deal that Inez wagers will make her financially independent. But she begins to have second thoughts when the body of one of Flo's women is discovered and when she learns of another silent business partner - one whose identity Flo refuses to divulge.

In 1904, the future best-selling writer Edna Ferber, then a 19-year-old fledgling reporter in Wisconsin, teams up with famed escape artist Harry Houdini to solve the baffling murder of a girl who has mysteriously disappeared from a locked room at the local high school.

A sniper appears in 1960s New Orleans, a sun-baked city of Black Panthers and other separatists. Five people have been fatally shot. When the sixth victim is killed, Lew Griffin is standing beside her. He's black and she's white, and though they are virtual strangers, it is left to Griffin to avenge her death, or at least to try and make some sense of it. His unlikely allies include a crusading black journalist, a longtime supplier of mercenary arms and troops, and bail bondsman Frankie DeNoux.

Termed the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the southwestern Indians and the first protest novel of California, Ramona is the story of 3 cultures - Indian, Mexican, and Anglo - locked in combat. The upheaval and injustice are humanized through the romance of a beautiful half-Indian orphan who grow up as the ward of Señora Moreno in privileged surroundings, then falls in love with an Indian and joins him in a life of poverty and tragedy. The Ramona Pageant in Hemet, California, based on this romance, has played each year since 1923, reenacting the transition period between Mexican traditions and the new U.S. and state governments.

It's 1976. Dr. Colin Sanford, a brilliant, ambitious obstetrician in the Pacific Northwest city of Emerald, has a plan to create the first in vitro baby. He recruits Dr. Giselle Hearn, an experienced laboratory geneticist/embryologist at the university who’s frustrated by the ultraconservative policies of her department chairman. Drs. Sanford and Hearn, working secretly, set out to put their names in the history books. Unfortunately, a secret that big is hard to keep....

Published in 1884, Sarah Orne Jewet's first novel, A Country Doctor, is a luminous portrayal of rural Maine and a semiautobiographical look at her world. In it, Nan's struggle to choose between marriage and a career as a doctor, between the confining life of a small town and a self-directed one as a professional, mirrors Jewett's own conflicts as well as eloquently giving voice to the leading women's issues of her time.

Set in the dangerous West Virginia frontier, this story tells of the bravery and heroism of Betty, the beautiful young sister of old Colonel Isaac Zane, one of the most courageous pioneers. Balanced against the grim incidents of the Indian War is the love story of Betty and Alfred Clarke, a handsome young soldier. Their romance, however, is plagued by troubles and endless interruptions before it reaches its stirring climax.

Once, When We Were Young is the stirring story of a young Texan and his two friends who get caught up in the pre-Civil War excitement. From the formation of local military units to the great battles that decided the outcome of the war, Will’s story is told in first person narrative, combining a fascinating, well-researched sense of history with a real feel of Texas pride and honor.

This short novel follows the fate of Sissy Jupe, a warm-hearted circus child, and the family that adopts her. Deserted by her ailing father, Sissy is taken into the cold household of the Gradgrind family, which operates a school. The "eminently practical" Thomas Gradgrind believes only in facts and figures and has raised his children accordingly, thoroughly suppressing the imaginative side of their nature, and the consequences are devastating.

The House of Mirth was Edith Wharton's first great novel. Set among the elegant brownstones of New York City and opulent country houses like gracious Bellomont on the Hudson, the novel creates a satiric portrayal of what Wharton herself called "a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers" with a precision comparable to that of Proust.

What would you say to a young stranger who wishes to die? What arguments would you use to restore his will to live? What ideas and ideals would you invoke to save him? Faced with that dilemma, the principal character of Elie Wiesel's magnificent novel - an old wanderer named Azriel - decides to tell a story: his own. The very one he was not supposed to tell, the one he had pledged to keep to himself.