New books by Historical Novel Society members, August 2024
Congratulations to our author members with new books out! If you’ve written a historical novel or nonfiction work published (or to be published) in April 2024 or after, send the following details in to compiler Sarah Johnson via our contact form by October 7 to be featured here: author, title, publisher, release date, and a blurb of one sentence or less. Please edit your blurbs down to one sentence before submitting; space is limited, and concise blurbs are appreciated. Details will appear in the November 2024 issue of HNR. Submissions may be edited.
In Without the Thunder (Donovan Family Saga Book 4) by Gifford MacShane (self-published, Oct. 2023), an outcast society belle is banished to the Arizona Territory where she falls in love with a Navajo man; can they defeat the woman hell-bent on destroying their happiness?
In Victoria Vassari’s The Doublecross (Weehawken Studio Arts, Dec. 17, 2023), first in the White City Novellas set during Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition, Pistol Pete, star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, has been framed for murder, and his friends – Little Egypt, exotic dancer on the Midway Plaisance, and Max, Pete’s horse handler – are determined to find out who killed Pete’s inamorata, Annie Brennan, and Archie, Sol Bloom’s assistant. In Book Two, Diamonds in the Rough (Dec. 24, 2023), Little Egypt and her new schoolteacher friend, Lucy, decide to sample the fare at the White Horse Inn and end up with more than they bargained for, like stolen jewels, runaway heiresses, and murder.
Bruce Balfour‘s The River of Eternity (Scribbling Gargoyle, Jan. 9) is the first novel in an ancient Egyptian historical epic thriller series based on the Harem Conspiracy assassination of Pharaoh Ramesses III in New Kingdom Egypt.
A tale of dark glamour and sisterhood, Queens of London by Heather Webb (Sourcebooks, Feb. 6) is a look at Britain’s first female crime syndicate, the ever-shifting meaning of justice, and the way women claim their power by any means necessary.
In The Better Half: A Novel of the Nevada Divorce Ranch Era by P.W. Borgman (Ash Canyon Press, Feb. 13), set in 1952, a Chicago socialite’s only hope of escaping her abusive husband is a Nevada divorce, forcing her to return to the land she left behind as an Indian Boarding School runaway.
Daughters of Riga by Marian Exall (The Wild Rose Press, Feb. 28) traces the histories of two girls who meet at the Dutch consulate in Riga in 1940 and whose postwar lives are haunted by questions about what happened there.
David K. Wessel’s debut novel, Choosing Sides (Moonshine Cove, Mar. 7) tells the story of an ordinary family (the author’s own) torn apart by Hitler’s Germany and illustrates in moving prose the dilemma that everyday people faced as the forces of evil took control of their homeland in the 1930s – a time with many social and political parallels to today’s world.
The Civil War tore the country apart, but it also tore families too; while the men were away fighting, women were fighting their own battles at home. This story is told in Her Last Full Measure by Gail Combs Oglesby (MotownGirl Publishing, Mar. 24).
In Shannon St. Hilaire’s To Look Upon the Sun (Wild Sage Books, Apr. 10), set in pre-WWII Germany, 17-year-old Ilse’s only refuge looms in the form of a Nazi maternity program designed to propagate Aryan purity—but she has a secret: her baby’s father is Jewish.
Robert Lee Murphy’s Eagle Talons: The Iron Horse Chronicles—Book One (Audible, Apr. 11), narrated by Brian James Stenberg, is first in a trilogy (first released in hardcover by Five Star in 2014) about a young man’s triumphs and tribulations while helping build the first transcontinental railroad in the American West in the late 1860s.
History meets mystery in this suspenseful journey to find treasure; let present-day Nancy Caldwell lead you to it over the beaches, through the woodlands, and across the decades on old Cape Cod in Barbara Eppich Struna’s The Old Cape Map (Bestrunabooks, Apr. 3).
A captured witch prophesies 5 Tudor Age Queens will be murdered, but can the hunted become the hunter? in Jan Foster’s Destiny Arising (So Simple Published Media, Apr. 19), a thrilling historical fantasy.
Power and Obsession by Catherine McCullagh (Big Sky, May 1) is the gripping story of a young woman sent to spy on her SS boss by the resistance in the dark world of occupied London following Britain’s defeat in World War II — a world that the Germans plan to reshape under King Edward VIII and his American queen, Wallis, a plan the resistance will do anything to thwart.
The Trail of Blood by A. K. Nairn (Broken Man Books, May 13) is a twisty murder mystery, set in the brutal world of the Border reivers in 1516.
In Daniel Pugsley’s Saviour of Babylon (Self, May 14), when Bani learns his father King Hammurabi is ill, he must return to Babylon and prevent bloodshed between his brothers.
Hatfield 1677 by Laura C. Rader (Acorn Publishing LLC, May 21) tells the true tale of the 1677 Native American attack on Hatfield, Massachusetts, and the two men who tracked and rescued the captives taken.
Alice McVeigh’s Pride and Perjury (Warleigh Hall Press, May 30) includes twelve deliciously witty short stories inspired by Pride and Prejudice.
43 years of detailed research by author Angela Locke is the background to Tamarisk: Love and War in France (Top Hat, May 31), a powerful novel which evokes the French Resistance in the last year of the European war, the tragedies of the post-war world, all set against a haunting story of love and separation.
As told in The Sun Shines Even In Winter: A Novel of Invasion and Espionage In World War I by Mark E. Fisher (Extraordinary Tales Publishing, June 1), it’s 1914, and after the Germans invade Dieter’s home in Lille, France and imprison his family and fiancée in an internment camp, his uncle, a lieutenant-general in the Prussian army, tells him, “Spy for the Kaiser, and I’ll free them.”
In Leona Upton Illig’s Erawan: A Reckoning in Laos (Three Villages Media, LLC, June 7), Americans in post-war Laos discover that the stumbling block to a new U.S.-Lao rapprochement lies not in an external enemy, but within themselves.
A Sea of Spectres by Nancy Taber (Acorn Press, June 30) is a multi-POV multi-timeline novel in which, on the choppy coastline of Prince Edward Island, an ocean-phobic detective evades the deadly lure of a phantom ship by delving into her family’s history and harnessing her matrilineal powers of premonition.
Debbie Wastling’s The Soundtrack of Their Lives (Bell Publishing, July 1), a family saga of working-class folk from Hull, East Yorkshire, is a musical heart-wrenching novel about family pain; it starts the long-lasting grudges of a dysfunctional family, with the bombing of the city being the least of their problems.
As Napoleon rises from the ashes of the French Revolution, one woman dares to spy against him: Book Three of the Château de Verzat series pulls Geneviève, a fearless and resilient fighter, from the vineyard to the front lines in Debra Borchert’s Her Own War (Le Vin Press, July 14).
In Running in the Shadows by Skye Alexander (Level Best/Historia, Aug), jazz singer Lizzie Crane is looking forward to performing at a 1926 spring equinox gala hosted by a wealthy art collector, until she discovers the body of a talented artist tied to a tree and shot full of arrows––and police think Lizzie’s best friend murdered him.
In Beth Ford‘s In the Time of Spirits (Independently published, Aug. 6), when devout spiritualist Addy marries a medium in 1890s America, she has to confront the possibility that what she believes is fake – and that her husband may even be a criminal.
Set during WWII, in The Seventh Room by Nicola Bell (Independently published, Aug.), Book 1 of Ishtar’s Gate, a young midwife joins the SOE to set Europe ablaze, an Oxford graduate infiltrates the German General Staff only to become involved with the ill-fated German Resistance, and a maverick spymaster with his eyes fixed on the veiled menace of the Soviets puts them both into play in the stone-cold crucible of Colditz Castle.
In Liz Harris’s The Silken Knot (Heywood Press, Sept. 5), the day in 1948 that Iris Hammond married Pierre Rousseau and moved to live with him in Dinan, Brittany, was the first time she’d met Pierre; both Pierre and Iris were soon to discover that their expectations of the marriage differed greatly.
Caught in the terrible winds of history, Tom Canty, the pauper from Mark Twain’s classic The Prince and the Pauper, now a teen, knows only a boy with his wily skills can aid his best friend, King Edward VI, and rescue his first love, Lady Jane Grey, in Frederic Fahey‘s The Scoundrel’s Son (Goose River Press, Sept. 15).
Set in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Mila Evanovich’s No Bread Tomorrow (Independently published, Sept.) unravels against the backdrop of political unrest, the Third Reich’s invasion, and three sisters harboring secrets so dangerous that, if discovered, could lead to their swift demise.
In Molly Green’s Courage for the Cabinet Girl (Avon/HarperCollins, Sept. 24), Katie Valentine, a secretary, is transferred to the secret underground Cabinet War Rooms where Mr Churchill is directing the war to achieve victory at all costs.
Elizabeth Boyle’s O Little Town of Bethlehem (Independently published, Oct. 1) brings to life a heartwarming story of three women who find empowerment, redemption, and the healing balm of friendship found in a small, turn of the century town lost in time.
In Deborah Lee Prescott’s Taken Away (Dorrance Publishing, Autumn 2024), young Elfie Hoffmann is disturbed by her friends’ embrace of the Hitler Youth; however, when she discovers her father has Jewish heritage, Elfie grows in her courage to reject all that the Nazis stand for, even as she faces an uncertain future.
Lost between the timeless lines of Homer’s epic, the Trojan women finally stand to be counted and will change the fate of Troy forever in Daughters of Bronze by A. D. Rhine (Dutton, Nov. 26).
The Book and the Knife Part One: Thegn of Berewic by Paul Cobb (Troubador Publishing, Nov. 28) is set around a powerful medieval book that will put a ruler on a throne – but which ruler and what country, and what links the book to the struggle between England’s two foremost families and the events leading up to the Norman invasion of 1066?
As told in Disguised Love by Marie E. Bast (Bonnet & Buggy Publishing, Dec. 1), after their parents’ death from cholera in 1849, Swedish immigrants Ingrid and Lars are forced into a fake marriage to rescue their siblings from an Iowa orphanage and adoption, but the fake marriage is only until Ingrid can earn enough for passage back to Sweden and her fiancé; thing is, the vow is not pretend for Lars or his drive for the cheap land.
A skeleton discovered buried beneath a city sidewalk leads a group of student archaeologists to the 19th-century spiritualist movement and the journey of three women seeking answers from beyond the grave in Riddle of Spirit and Bone by Carolyn Korsmeyer (Regal House, Feb. 4, 2025).
