Showing results by author "Karen Heenan" in All Categories

Ten-year-old Bess is only good at one thing—singing, which has no place in her family's bleak existence. When her father sells her to the king of England, she balances the loss of all she's known against a world of music and plenty, and builds a new life as a royal minstrel, earning the nickname "the king's songbird." Bess comes of age in the dangerous Tudor court, where the stakes are always high, and where politics, heartbreak, and disease threaten everyone from the king to the lowliest musician.

Ava and Claire have moved on from the traumatic events of 1934—while Ava has decided at last to marry patient Max Byrne and allow love back into her life, Claire and her husband have gone to France to repair their relationship. Harry encounters an old friend in Paris and offers to assist two Jewish refugees trying to flee a continent on the verge of war.

Recently widowed Ava has moved to Philadelphia, determined to start over. With her children and blossoming career as a dressmaker taking up all her time, she's not ready for charming, persistent Max Byrne. But he shows up at every turn, making it impossible for Ava to ignore him—and worse yet, she's not sure she wants to. Claire is torn between pride in her sister's self-reliance and finding a way to pay back the debt she owes her. When an unexpected meeting in Washington DC gives Claire the chance to make change on an even larger scale, she jumps at the opportunity.

Ava has always been poor, so she doesn't think the Great Depression will change anything. But when her mother dies and her coal miner husband loses his job, Ava's certainty falters. The last thing she needs is a letter from her estranged sister, asking for the impossible.

Prickly, introverted Robin Lewis is a man with secrets. Returning to England after five years in exile, he is arrested and charged with heresy by the dying Queen Mary. He makes the risky decision to share his story over a days-long journey to the Tower of London. Will that decision make his captor see his humanity, or will it hasten his execution? Robin risks all and revisits his life under three Tudor monarchs, wondering how he will be judged—not just by the queen, but by the God he stopped serving long ago.