Showing results by publisher "Highbridge Audio" in Historical Fiction

Vienna-June 1804. At the glittering debut of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, a Spanish diplomat meets with Captain Thomas Grey, agent of His Majesty's Secret Service. In exchange for a gigantic bribe, the Spaniard discloses Spain's most closely-held secret, the terms of its San Ildefonso Treaty with France. Spain's neutrality in Napoleon's war on Britain is only a ruse to keep the British navy from attacking the last great treasure-armada, now gathering in South America.

You can't trust a man who's dressed as Mae West, especially not in Mae West's house. One of Hollywood's earliest sex symbols, the whip-smart blonde's star has fallen since the Hays Code cracked down on the racy repartee that made her famous. Her latest project is a thinly veiled autobiographical novel, whose only copy is stolen just after she finishes her first draft. Tonight she's having a Mae West party, with every guest a man dressed as her. The thief is among those in drag, and P.I. Toby Peters has come to tear off his wig. He's there as a favor to his brother, a brutal cop who had a fling with West when she first moved to Hollywood.

Coffins fill the basement of a crumbling Los Angeles movie theater. Five vampires crowd around fading horror idol Bela Lugosi, peppering him with questions. A malfunctioning plastic fang causes one of the undead-wannabes to lisp. The effect is less than fearsome, but Lugosi is terrified, for one of these oddballs has been making threats on his life. He hires Toby Peters to provide security against his unbalanced fans. The detective is not concerned, but he should be.

1940: Weeks after the evacuation of Dunkirk, Germany is poised to invade a near-defenseless Britain. To safeguard the Crown Jewels from the Nazis, Winston Churchill devises a daring gamble to have them shipped overseas. The priceless artifacts will be secretly removed from the Tower of London and driven north to Scotland by two operatives posing as a young married couple, to be taken from there to Canada.

An ax-wielding monk hacks at the door. Toby Peters is on the other side, running as fast as his recently broken leg will allow. Alongside him is Salvador Dalí, dressed in a rabbit suit, insistently muttering "grasshoppers" as they try to make their escape. Dalí insists on being carried across the lawn, so Peters hobbles along with the surrealist in his arms. They get in the car just as the monk chops down the front door. The car doesn't start, and the monk charges silently, the ax in the air.

Since the start of World War II, Cary Grant has been working undercover in Hollywood as a spy for the British crown. When a ring of Nazi sympathizers gets wise, they start blackmailing the debonair leading man. Now Grant has hired Toby Peters to handle the payoff. But when the blackmailer is killed, the rumpled detective and the suave movie star are thrust into a complex plot of murder, money, and Nazi spies, leading to a literal cliff-hanger....

On the set of Boom!, a big‑budget adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play, Elizabeth Taylor is at the height of her fame. It's an exhilarating experience for everyone in her orbit. That includes Jean, her personal assistant, and Buddy, her semi-closeted best friend and costume designer. Yet Jean can see that for all Elizabeth’s verve, she's worried that her box-office potential is dimming. At thirty-five, she needs to stretch. She sets her sights on an unlikely role: the lead in the film version of Hello, Dolly!

Olive Schreiner's From Man to Man or Perhaps Only―, unfinished at the time of her death and posthumously published in 1926, tells the story of two white women born into the racist society of mid-nineteenth-century South Africa. One sister remains in the British Cape Colony and finds a way to deal with her husband's infidelities. The other, raped at age fifteen, is hounded out of her insular white South African community, and becomes a kept woman in London's East End.

Who is Mary Darling? In this smartly subversive Victorian mash-up of the legendary literary novels Peter Pan and Sherlock Holmes, the intrepid mother of the Darling children is on the case—and always one step ahead of her inept husband and a famous detective.

The young Victoria remembers nothing but Kensington Palace. Arriving as a baby, she has been brought up inside its musty, mold-ridden walls. Others may see the value of Kensington's priceless artifacts and objets d'art, but the palace is a jail cell for young Victoria.

The press dubs them "the Gold Dust twins." Born within a week of one another in Manhattan in 1912, Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton both inherit unimaginable fortunes. By the time of their lavish coming-out balls, they are two of the richest women in the world. Barbara, heiress to the Woolworth millions, amasses seven husbands over her lifetime. Doris, meanwhile, has a sophistication and financial savvy that Barbara tries endlessly to emulate.

London, 1941. Britain has endured the relentless bombing campaign of the Blitz and emerged, scarred but unbroken. Caitrin, too, strives to weather each challenge that comes her way, though her ever-ready banter belies deep heartbreak and loss. But now the war has entered another phase. Instead of indiscriminate bombing, the Luftwaffe is pinpointing historic targets, including cathedrals and ancestral homes. It's as if Germany plans to erase Britain's very essence and culture, destroying morale as it does so.

Chasing Whispers is a unique Afro-irrealist collection of Black speculative fiction in transformative stories of culture, longing, hybridity, unlimited futures, a collision of worlds, and folklore. It contains thirteen stories, eleven of which are original, with a commanding introduction by D. Harlan Wilson. The collection is aligned with the themes of Eugen Bacon's other fiction, and her recognition in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for "doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction."

World War II is raging overseas, but life remains painfully quiet on the rugged New England fishing island of Fourth Cliff. With most of its able-bodied male inhabitants away in the service, the island is now home only to aged fishermen, concerned women and children, and second-rate soldiers guarding a low-priority military emplacement and camp for Italian POWs.

In Seasons of Purgatory, the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from a variety of perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.

It is the mid-eighties, two decades into the kleptocratic, brutal rule of Ferdinand Marcos. The Philippine economy is in deep recession, and civil unrest is growing by the day. But Primi Peregrino has her own priorities: tracking down books and pursuing romantic connections with their authors.

In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance - familial, cultural, emotional, artistic - really means. In a California of the '60s and '70s, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high school locker-room chatter, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants.

In 1974, Roy Frady was a perfect cop. Now he's perfect fodder for one of Maggie MacGowen's documentaries. Frady worked narcotics in the 77th Street Precinct as part of a unit nicknamed the Four Whoresmen, a bunch of hard-drinking, womanizing cops that included Maggie's current lover, homicide Detective Mike Flint. They were successful at shutting down the drug trade in their district until a series of brutality charges brought about their downfall.

It’s 1956, and working-mother Ava Lark and her son, Lewis, have rented a house in a less-than-welcoming Boston suburb. There, Lewis finds he is only able to befriend the other fatherless kids on the block, Jimmy and Rose. But when Jimmy goes missing, neighborhood paranoia ramps to new heights, further ostracizing Ava and Lewis.

The sleek high-rises of Park Avenue make Frank Clemons uneasy. The former Atlanta homicide detective came to New York after a sickening murder case soured him on the South, but despite the glitz and excitement of his new surroundings and the beauty of the woman he shares them with, the city makes his skin crawl. Now a private eye, he is only at ease in the city's darker corners, among the whores, gamblers, and pimps who call Eighth Avenue home. That affinity for the socially isolated is what draws him to the case of Hannah Karlsberg, an elderly seamstress who deserved a better death than she got.