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

John Henry Cole, working as a deputy US marshal out of Judge Isaac Parker's court in Fort Smith, Arkansas, was on assignment in the Indian Nations when he was shot and seriously injured. Now, 15 years later, employed as a deputy for Judge Roy Bean in Texas, Cole receives a personal summons from Judge Parker to appear in his court within 30 days. Cole isn't inclined to go, but he knows whatever's on Judge Parker's mind is serious and decides he has to go.

The Sisters of the Crescent Empress is the second book in Leena Likitalo's Waning Moon Duology, a fabulous historical fantasy based on the lives of the Romanov sisters. We all think we know how the story ends...with the Crescent Empress dead, a civil war has torn the empire asunder. No one seems able to stop the ruthless Gagargi Prataslav. The five Daughters of the Moon are where he wants them to be, held captive in an isolated house in the far north.

The Living Infinite is based on the true story of the Spanish princess Eulalia, an outspoken firebrand at the Bourbon court during the troubled and decadent final years of her family's reign. After her cloistered childhood at the Spanish court, her youth spent in exile, and a loveless marriage, Eulalia gladly departs Europe for the New World. In the company of a small-town bookseller with a thirst for adventure, she travels by ship, first to a Cuba bubbling with revolutionary fervor then on to the 1893 Chicago World Fair.

When the Countess of Walther dies at her German estate, her loyal dwarfess Maria-Barbara is forced to work as a prophet for a traveling magician, who betrays her by selling her to the queen of Spain. At the royal court in Madrid, Mari finds herself in a bizarre, enchanted world, a society culturally splendid but intellectually isolated. There she becomes Maribarbola, prophet to the queen, and, her survival at stake, endeavors to outsmart the Spaniards.

The Crescent Empire teeters on the edge of a revolution, and the Five Daughters of the Moon are the ones to determine its future.

A timely novel about the radicalization of a Muslim teen in California - about where identity truly lies, and how we find it. Laguna Beach, California, 2010. Reza Courdee, a 14-year-old straight-A student and chemistry whiz, takes his first hit of pot. In as long as it takes to inhale and exhale, he is transformed from the high-achieving son of Iranian immigrants into a happy-go-lucky stoner.

It's the spring of 1864, and times are hard in Washington County, Arkansas, especially for 13-year-old Travis Ford. He hasn't heard from his father, a sergeant in the Second Arkansas Cavalry, in months. His mother is struggling to make ends meet on the family farm and abandoned sawmill near Poison Spring. All Travis really wants to do is to follow his passion - make up adventure stories in the style of Alexandre Dumas. But the Civil War keeps getting in his way.

Chicago, 1881. Assigned to her second case as a Pinkerton, Lilly still needs to prove herself - both as a detective and as a woman in a man's world. Ordered to again work with Lilly, Cade needs to redeem himself for conduct unbecoming to a Pinkerton - a grief-driven drunken brawl. As if their forced partnership wasn't bad enough, the agents must pose as husband and wife servants in the troubled household of a wealthy New Orleans family. An acting challenge if ever there was one.

At the dawn of the 20th century, a young Lebanese adventurer leaves the Levant to explore the wilds of Africa, encountering an eccentric English colonel in Sudan and enlisting in his service. In this lush chronicle of far-flung adventure, the military recruit crosses paths with a compatriot who has dismantled a sumptuous palace in Tripoli and is transporting it across the continent on a camel caravan.

A sweltering July in Chicago, 1923. Edna Ferber, now a famous short-story writer, is supposed to be researching the novel that will become So Big, her Pulitzer-Prize winner. With her mother, Julia, she spends the week visiting her mother's old childhood friend, Esther Newmann, who lives with her family on the edge of the bustling Maxwell Street Jewish marketplace. But the awful specter of a scandalous murder 15 years before suddenly haunts Edna.

Tormented by Southern partisans, Missouri farm boy Caleb Cole joins the Union's 18th Missouri. About the same time, down on the Texas coast, violin-playing Ryan McCalla, from a well-to-do family, enlists in the Confederacy's Second Texas - mainly in the spirit of adventure - with some friends. The two teenagers are about to grow up quickly. Fate will bring the two together - along with a teenage girl from Corinth, Mississippi, when the Confederate and Union armies clash at Shiloh, Tennessee.

In The Last of All Possible Worlds, royalty, bankers, lovers, and wives intertwine to create a vivid portrait of Europe in the early 1900s. We meet wise and worldly Prince Sobieski, Vienna's ambassador in London, his enchanting wife, her English lover, and her enigmatic lifelong companion, Josefa. When Sobieski's illegitimate daughter makes a demand of her influential father, the unspoken rules of the family are challenged.

Set in the early 1900s, the novel follows young Lucia Rutkowska who, thanks to the influence of her beloved grandmother, escapes the Warsaw ghetto to work as a kitchen maid in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the bustling city of Paris. Too talented for her lowly position, Lucia is thrown out on the street. Her only recourse is to take a job working for a married couple - two disorganized, rather poor scientists so distracted by their work that their house and young child are often neglected.

When a pleasant afternoon's bicycling through Golden Gate Park with a friend ends with the revelation of threatening letters, followed by a gunshot in a mansion garden, Sabina Carpenter knows this is a case that demands her immediate and undivided attention. The questions her partner John Quincannon has to unravel are not difficult: Wrixton, a wealthy banker, has met his extortionist's first demand, but the order to pay another $5,000 is too much to face. The banker's real problem is something he doesn't want to reveal.

Chicago, 1881. The idea of a female detective is virtually unheard of. But when famed crime buster Allan Pinkerton opens his agency's doors to a handful of women, one intrepid actress with her own troubled past is driven to defy convention and take on a new and dangerous role. Since the age of 11, when her mother was murdered, the life of the theater is all Lilly Long has known. Now 22, she has blossomed into an accomplished Shakespearean actress.

In the summer of 1866, Jacob Ballard, a former Union soldier and spy, is dispatched by the War Department in Washington City to infiltrate the isolated North Carolina mountain community where he was born and find a serial killer responsible for the deaths of Union veterans. Based on true events, That Bright Land is the story of a violent and fragile nation in the wake of the Civil War and a man who must exorcise his own savage demons while tracking down another.

From the butchery of the Crater, where stunning success collapsed into a massacre, through near-constant battles fought by heat-stricken soldiers to the crucial election of 1864, The Damned of Petersburg resurrects the American Civil War's hard reality, as plumes and sabers gave way to miles of trenches.

In 1938, Hitler visits Italy. An expatriate Irish art historian is obliged to guide Mussolini and his guest around the galleries. Half fascinated, half repelled, he watches the tyrants, wrestling with the uneasy conviction that he ought to use the opportunity to "do something" about them yet lacking the zeal that might transform misgivings into action. Thirty years later, his daughter comes across a compromising clipping showing her father with the dictators.

The summer of 1873 marked Madison's last drive up what is now called the Chisholm Trail. It was the first time he tasted oysters and the only time he pinned on a badge. It was the summer of longhorns, miserable heat, friendship and betrayal, and murder. In the end it was the summer the whole world came crumbling down on the United States, and Madison's world crashed, too. The summer of 1873 was the year Madison watched a bunch of men die. One of them was a man he killed, an encounter one never forgets.

Absenting himself for a brief intimacy with a former girlfriend, Hugh Mcpherson leaves his surfing-obsessed sons on an isolated California beach. When he returns, the 11-year-old twins have vanished. A ferocious riptide has swept Takumi and Hitoshi out to sea, their bodies unrecovered. Devastated by the loss, Hugh and his Japanese wife, Setsuko, divorce. Severing all ties to America, Setsuko returns to Japan to live with her father, Kazuki Ono, a prominent author of mind-bending novels.