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

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.

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.

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....

It's 1916, and time's running out for Scott Joplin. Before he dies, he wants to provide for his wife and secure his place in musical history. He's written a musical drama, and his young piano student, Martin Niederhoffer, convinces him to try to get Irving Berlin to publish and produce the work. The next day, Niederhoffer walks into his office and finds Joplin crouched over the blood-soaked body of a young man. He hustles his teacher away, but the two are seen leaving the building.

The year is AD 29, and Jerusalem chafes under the Roman Empire’s continued presence and oppressive rule. In spite of that unpleasant fact, life goes on—but not for everyone. People die, some because it is their time, others by misadventure. One death in particular brings the city’s daily routine to a halt. A badly burned body is found behind the veil of the holy of holies—the temple’s inner sanctum and the most sacred space on earth for the Jews.

The spring of A.D. 98 is a time of optimism in the province of Britannia and business is brisk at the inn run by Aurelia Marcella. Then a wagon arrives bearing a farmer with a grievous sword wound and Aurelia's twin brother, Lucius, who is a government investigator, is sent for.

When University of Washington Professor Benjamin Bradshaw discovers the dead body of a despised colleague inside the Faraday cage of the electric machine, his carefully controlled world shatters.

A hippie commune has invaded Black River Falls. While the majority of the townspeople believe that the bohemians have the right to stay - despite how bizarre some of their ways can seem - as always, there is a minority that constantly accuses them of everything from criminal activities to Satanism. As usual, lawyer and private investigator Sam McCain finds himself in the middle of the controversy, especially when the teenage daughter of Paul Mainwaring, is found murdered in the commune’s barn.

In June 1951, Edna Ferber heads to Hollywood to support an old friend, Max, who has found himself blacklisted in the McCarthy anti-Communist hearings, which have rattled Hollywood with allegations of Communist sympathies. She has no plans of becoming involved with the soon-to-be-released MGM film based on her bestselling novel Show Boat.

Catherine, wife of one-handed Edgar, daughter of a Jewish merchant, and mother of two small children, is a Christian convert. Agnes, her estranged sister, has returned to Paris with the news that she is to marry a German lord. She wants no part of her Jewish family, except the sizable dowry her father can provide.

Beneath layers of volcanic ash lies the Villa della Notte, home to first-century nobles, as well as to the captivating slave girl at the heart of an ancient controversy. And secreted in a subterranean labyrinth rests a cache of antique documents believed lost to the ages: a prize too tantalizing for classics professor Sophie Chase to resist.

The year 1916 was not shaping up to be a good one for Alafair Tucker, and finding Bernie Arruda dead in a ditch didn’t help matters. Alafair had not wanted to go to Arizona in the first place. But her 10-year-old daughter, Blanche, was suffering from a stubborn ailment of the lungs, and her best chance for a cure was dry desert air. So Alafair and her husband, Shaw, had bundled their sick child onto the train and made the difficult trip from Oklahoma to the home of Alafair’s sister in Tempe, Arizona.