New books by HNS members, November 2019

It’s great to see so many new releases this issue. Congrats to all the authors! If you’re an HNS member who’s written a historical novel or nonfiction work published in August 2019 or after, your fellow authors and readers want to know about it. Please send the following details in to Sarah Johnson via our contact form or @readingthepast by Jan. 7, 2020: author, title, publisher, release date, and a blurb of one sentence or less. Details will appear in February’s magazine. Submissions may be edited for space.

Slaves of Passion by Patricia Stinson (Amazon, Mar. 10) features a pre-Civil War fair-skinned slave girl who is pregnant, and whose one desire is to have her baby born in free territory; her desire leads to deceptions, extreme hardships, death, and murder for three generations.

In her sweeping debut, The Abolitionist’s Daughter (Kensington, Apr. 29), Diane C. McPhail offers a powerful emotional novel of little-known Civil War history—Southern Abolitionists—and the timeless struggle to do right even amidst bitter conflict.

In Jo Schaffel and Sara Webley’s Somewhere Besides Denver (Pangolin Books, Apr. 30), three teenage girls in 1907 yearn for a future more exciting than society parties and safe marriages, so they leave their Denver homes with a chaperone to enjoy a Grand Tour to Paris and London, greet the new century, join the suffrage movement, meet artists and fashion designers, and defy their parents’ expectations.

In The Artifacts by Eric Reynolds (Hadley Rille, May 1), within the walls of an abandoned old house on Kayla’s land, she learns of the house’s past, of her town, and perhaps ways to revitalize Sycamore Falls when she retrieves old books from a shelf that transport her to the past, to the town’s better times.

In De Bohun’s Destiny, the third Meonbridge Chronicle by Carolyn Hughes (Riverdown Books, May 3), set in 14th-century England, Margaret de Bohun knows her husband lied for the best of reasons yet must defend his falsehood, while her companion, Matilda, exposes the truth to her lover, Thorkell Boune, oblivious to the danger that he won’t scruple to pursue exactly what he wants, no matter who gets in his way.

John B. Kachuba’s Shapeshifters: A History (Reaktion Books, May 13) is a lively and informative investigation of the shapeshifter character found in religions, folk beliefs, and legends in cultures all around the world from prehistoric times to modern-day encounters and pop culture.

In State of Treason by Paul Walker (Sharpe Books, May 20), first in a series of Elizabethan spy thrillers, William Constable, astrologer and physician, becomes an unwilling aide in uncovering a conspiracy involving a hidden, illegitimate royal child.

Finding Annie by Peter Maher (Xlibris, Jun. 5) tells the story of a young Irish girl who escapes poverty to build a new life in the USA.

Carrying Independence (224pages, Jun. 11) is a sweeping debut novel, by Karen A. Chase, in which an intrepid Post rider, determined to avoid fighting in the American Revolutionary War, embarks on an epic quest, carrying the sole copy of the Declaration of Independence to seven founding fathers, whose final signatures will unite the colonies.

True Freedom by Michael Dean (Holland Park Press, Jun. 12) is about how America came to fight Britain for its freedom in the eighteenth century.

Harmony in Winslet by Gail Balentine (Amazon, Jul. 6) is the story of Jane Harmony, a young nurse in Boston at the height of World War II, who must face old ghosts and dangerous people in a town she swore never to step a foot in again in order to prove her brother innocent of murder.

Paradise Square (Hill House, Jul. 20) by E.M. Schorb, a reprint of the International eBook Award Foundation’s inaugural Grand Prize for Fiction winner, is set in New York, where Edgar Allan Poe must solve a murder to save a friend; it was first reviewed in HNR 18 (Nov. 2001).

Colleen Kelly-Eiding’s Favoured By Fortune (Phase Publishing, LLC, Aug. 1) is described as “Jane Austen meets Hannibal Lecter.”

On Christmas night 1519, the royal court in Cracow is shaken by a puzzling murder; a lady-in-waiting sets out to investigate, only to discover a deadly secret at the heart of Queen Bona’s household in Silent Water, A Jagiellon Mystery Book 1, by P. K. Adams (Iron Knight Press, Aug. 6).

In antebellum Charleston, South Carolina, a Catholic priest grapples with doubt, his secret African ancestry, and his love for a slave owner’s wife in Elizabeth Bell‘s debut novel Necessary Sins (Claire-Voie Books, Aug. 7), the first book of the Lazare Family Saga.

Eden Waits by Maryka Biaggio (Milford House Press, Aug. 19), based on the true story of a utopian colony founded in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the 1890s, explores the collision between human frailty, idealism, and economic realities.

In Water Lily Dance (Little Cabin Books, Aug. 20) by Michelle Muriel, the stunning backdrop of 19th-century Paris at the height of the Impressionist art movement intertwines with the present as three women centuries apart set out to escape a colorless life, connected by one of the most controversial, beloved artists in the world: Claude Monet—but at what cost?

The Four Bells by Brodie Curtis (Westy Vistas Books, Sep. 1) tells the story of damaged World War I veteran Al Weldy as he revisits his hometown on Christmas Eve 1931, intending to raise a toast to his dead comrade-in-arms, Eddie Beane, and finds Eddie’s sister Maddy, his one-time flame, behind the bar of The Four Bells pub.

Tinney Sue Heath’s Lady of the Seven Suns: A Novel of the Woman Saint Francis Called Brother (indie, Sep. 1), based on fact, tells of the wealthy 13th-century Roman noblewoman who must come to grips with her privilege and thread her way between duty and faith as she follows Francesco of Assisi, the saint who considers himself wedded to “Lady Poverty.”

In Judge Thee Not (Beyond the Page Publishing, Sep. 10), Edith Maxwell‘s fifth Quaker Midwife Mystery, midwife Rose Carroll fights bias and blind assumption to clear the name of a friend when a murderer strikes in her late nineteenth-century Massachusetts mill town.

In Northern Wolf by Daniel Greene (Rune Publishing, Sep. 12), Wolf’s company of misfits find themselves riding with Custer and the Michigan Brigade on a collision course with master horseman J.E.B. Stuart and the Army of Northern Virginia in a small town in Pennsylvania, called Gettysburg.

Set in 1066, the year of three battles for England’s crown, Fulford, Stamford and Hastings, Stamford and the Unknown Warrior by Garrett Pearson (Morepork Publishing, Sep. 12) tells the tale of two orphan brothers; one will become the powerful but unknown Norse warrior that held the bridge against the Saxon army of Harold Godwinson, and the other will fight for Harold at Hastings.

Suanne Schafer’s second novel, Hunting the Devil (Waldorf, Sep. 15), transports readers through one of the most grotesque moments in world history, the Rwandan Genocide; a powerful story of determination and revenge, it is also about how war changes one’s definition of humanity and, ultimately, what it means to be human.

In Kathleen Baldwin’s Harbor for the Nightingale (Ink Lion, Sep. 26), an alternate history set in 1814, Maya Barrington, one of Miss Stranje’s unusual girls, must act as a double agent to thwart Napoleon’s scheme to seize control of Britain.

The final installment in the Miramonde Series trilogy, A Place in the World by Amy Maroney (Arlelan Press, Sep. 26) concludes the mesmerizing story of a Renaissance-era female artist and the modern-day scholar on her trail.

Curt Locklear’s Reconciled (Warren Publishing, Oct), 3rd in the Asunder Trilogy, Civil War-era historical fiction filled with action and romance and hailed as a “masterpiece of storytelling” by Readers’ Favorite, features two women who love a soldier who has amnesia.

The Haunting of Fury Falls Inn (Fury Falls Inn Book 1) by Betty Bolte (Mystic Owl, Oct. 1) is supernatural historical fiction set in north Alabama in 1821.

Twenty Years After: A Sequel to The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (Pegasus Books, Oct. 1) is the next in Lawrence Ellsworth’s series of new, contemporary translations of the Musketeers Cycle, as d’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis grapple with the challenges of politics and maturity.

Susan Higginbotham‘s The First Lady and the Rebel (Sourcebooks Landmark, Oct. 1) tells the story of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln and her beloved sister Emily Todd Helm, a Confederate rebel’s wife.

A western comedy/romance, Lady Law and the Texas DeRangers by Xina Marie Uhl (XCPublishing.net, Oct. 1), set in West Texas, is a rollicking ride that pits a lady sheriff and a slick gambler against each other and the weirdest outlaws in the Old West.

Andie Newton’s The Girl I Left Behind (Aria/Head of Zeus, Oct. 3) is a Nazi spy drama about a young German woman who infiltrates the Nazi Party to find her missing best friend.

A novel-in-stories, Floating in the Neversink by Andrea Simon (Black Rose Writing, Oct. 3) follows a sensitive and impressionable young Jewish girl, Amanda Gerber, through the evocative world of Brooklyn’s Flatbush interspersed with summers in the Catskill Mountains from 1955-1961, a time of veiled innocence and impending turbulence.

Set in post-World War II Sicily and mid-eighties America, How Fires End by Marco Rafalà (Little A, Oct. 15) chronicles the long legacy of a single act of violence, illustrating along the way the complicated dynamics of familial bonds, the devastating effects of war upon childhoods, and the inextricable nature of personal and political identities.

In J. Lynn Else’s next book The Lost Daughters of Avalon, book 2 of Awakenings (Inklings, late Oct.), when an ancient evil threatens, four Minnesota teens must learn to harness magic in order to save the realms of Avalon and Earth.

Anne Easter Smith’s This Son of York (Bellastoria, Nov. 10), the sixth and final book about the York family in the Wars of the Roses, is a 21st-century look at Richard III following the discovery of his grave in 2012 and extensive analysis of his bones.