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At the Water's Edge
Sara Gruen - 2015
To Maddie’s horror, Ellis decides that the only way to regain his father’s favor is to succeed in a venture his father attempted and very publicly failed at: he will hunt the famous Loch Ness monster and when he finds it he will restore his father’s name and return to his father’s good graces (and pocketbook). Joined by their friend Hank, a wealthy socialite, the three make their way to Scotland in the midst of war. Each day the two men go off to hunt the monster, while another monster, Hitler, is devastating Europe. And Maddie, now alone in a foreign country, must begin to figure out who she is and what she wants. The novel tells of Maddie’s social awakening: to the harsh realities of life, to the beauties of nature, to a connection with forces larger than herself, to female friendship, and finally, to love.
Is This Tomorrow
Caroline Leavitt - 2013
Lewis yearns for his absent father, befriending the only other fatherless kids: Jimmy and Rose. One afternoon, Jimmy goes missing. The neighborhood in the era of the Cold War, bomb scares, and paranoia seizes the opportunity to further ostracize Ava and her son. Lewis never recovers from the disappearance of his childhood friend. By the time he reaches his twenties, he's living a directionless life, a failure in love, estranged from his mother. Rose is now a schoolteacher in another city, watching over children as she was never able to watch over her own brother. Ava is building a new life for herself in a new decade. When the mystery of Jimmy's disappearance is unexpectedly solved, all three must try to reclaim what they have lost.
Palace of Spies
Sarah Zettel - 2013
Sixteen-year-old Peggy is a well-bred orphan who is coerced into posing as a lady in waiting at the palace of King George I. Life is grand, until Peggy starts to suspect that the girl she's impersonating might have been murdered. Unless Peggy can discover the truth, she might be doomed to the same terrible fate. But in a court of shadows and intrigue, anyone could be a spy—perhaps even the handsome young artist with whom Peggy is falling in love...History and mystery spark in this effervescent series debut.
Sanctus
Simon Toyne - 2011
This is no ordinary suicide but a symbolic act. And thanks to the media, it is witnessed by the entire world.But few understand it. For charity worker Kathryn Mann and a handful of others in the know, it is what they have been waiting for. The cowled and secretive fanatics that live in the Citadel suspect it could mean the end of everything they have built – and they will kill, torture and break every law to stop that. For Liv Adamsen, New York crime reporter, it begins the next stage of a journey into the heart of her own identity.And at that journey's end lies a discovery that will change EVERYTHING …SANCTUS is an apocalyptic conspiracy thriller like no other – it re-sets the bar for excitement and fascination, and marks the debut of a major talent in Simon Toyne.
The Bookman’s Tale
Charlie Lovett - 2013
Peter Byerly isn't sure what drew him into this particular bookshop. Nine months earlier, the death of his beloved wife, Amanda, had left him shattered. The young antiquarian bookseller relocated from North Carolina to the English countryside, hoping to rediscover the joy he once took in collecting and restoring rare books. But upon opening an eighteenth-century study of Shakespeare forgeries, Peter is shocked when a portrait of Amanda tumbles out of its pages. Of course, it isn't really her. The watercolor is clearly Victorian. Yet the resemblance is uncanny, and Peter becomes obsessed with learning the picture's origins. As he follows the trail back first to the Victorian era and then to Shakespeare's time, Peter communes with Amanda's spirit, learns the truth about his own past, and discovers a book that might definitively prove Shakespeare was, indeed, the author of all his plays.
The Lemoncholy Life of Annie Aster
Scott Wilbanks - 2015
Even more peculiar is Elsbeth, the truculent schoolmarm who sends Annie letters through the mysterious brass mailbox perched on the picket fence that now divides their two worlds.Annie and Elsbeth’s search for an explanation to the hiccup in the universe linking their homes leads to an unsettling discovery—and potential disaster for both of them. Together they must solve the mystery of what connects them before one of them is convicted of a murder that has yet to happen…and yet somehow already did.
Harbored Secrets
Marie F. Martin - 2013
473 Five Star reviews on Amazon. Historical novel with a psychological mystery in the unearthing of family secrets. In May of 1935, Blinny Platt's homestead shack burns to the ground forever leaving her family asunder, scattering them like the embers flew on the Montana wind. She was only eight-years-old, sent away and in charge of her little sister. She could handle that because Platts take care of Platts.However, it is the hidden secrets of her parents smoldering beneath the charred remains that haunts Blinny until 1982. She once again leaves the home place to build a house for herself. As the foundation is poured and the walls go up, each of the hurtful memories are uncovered. Finally the mystery, left in the ashes of the burned home, is revealed. How could her mother do what she did?Recent Five-Star Reviews:By the end of the very first paragraph, I knew Marie F. Martin had written a book I would have a hard time putting down. In between high drama, there is a love letter to Montana, and she uses her love of the English language throughout. More "Oh wow" moments in this book than any other I have ever read in my more than half a century of life. Yvonne Bechtold, Five-star reviewerThis is a tale so well told, you can smell the sage, feel the heat, and pain this family shares. I wish more authors crafted their characters so well. Renita Hulsey Five-Star Reader Review.The author was a master at weaving the past with the present. Quaintreader Five-Star Reader ReviewMartin knows family dynamics and human frailties. From these she has crafted a heartbreaking story, of love, loss, and endurance. Barb Ward Five-Star Reader Review
Playing with Fire
Tess Gerritsen - 2015
The first time Julia Ansdell picks up The Incendio Waltz, she knows it’s a strikingly unusual composition. But while playing the piece, Julia blacks out and awakens to find her young daughter implicated in acts of surprising violence. And when she travels to Venice to find the previous owner of the music, she uncovers a dark secret that involves dangerously powerful people—a family who would stop at nothing to keep Julia from bringing the truth to light.
The Psalter
Galen Watson - 2012
This time, it leads to a medieval manuscript and murder. Was it an ordinary theft gone wrong or something more? The Carabinieri in Rome would like to know.Michael Romano is an American priest working in the Vatican's Secret Archives with a penchant for stepping over the line. Church Inquisitors have noticed -- and they aren’t happy. Nevertheless, Romano is also the Church’s senior paleographer, an expert in ancient manuscripts, and his expertise is needed to examine a ninth-century codex known as a Psalter.Father Romano’s examination leads him into the past as he uncovers an historical narrative of medieval forgeries, Saracen invasions and a legendary fight for the richest kingdom on earth. Yet he has unwittingly become a target for those who will stop at nothing to possess the secret of the Psalter.*Untraditional Christianity Warning
All He Saw Was The Girl
Peter Leonard - 2011
Rome:McCabe and Chip, two American exchange students, are about to become embroiled with a violent street gang, a beautiful Italian girl, and a flawed kidnapping plan.Detroit:Sharon Vanelli’s affair with Joey Palermo, a Mafia enforcer, is about to be discovered by her husband, Ray, a secret service agent.Brilliantly plotted and shot through with wry humor, ALL HE SAW WAS THE GIRL sees these two narratives collide in the backstreets of Italy’s oldest city.
Where Darkness Dwells
Glen R. Krisch - 2011
They stumble upon the Underground, a network of uncharted caverns just below the surface of Coal Hollow. Time holds no sway in the Underground. People no longer age and their wounds heal as if by magic. By morning, one boy is murdered, while the other never returns home.The Underground is hidden for a reason. Certain locals want to keep their lair secret, no matter the cost.After learning a long-held family secret, Theodore Cooper is set adrift. Once well off and set in his ways, he is no longer sure of his role in society. He leaves his comfortable life in Chicago to tramp the countryside, searching for meaning in this new context. During his travels, he’s drawn to an abandoned house in Coal Hollow and impulsively buys it.Cooper doesn’t know that a massacre had taken place in his new house. In 1851, a group of bounty hunters tracked a family of runaway slaves to the home. They wound up killing the homeowners as conspirators, then chased the runaways into a cellar tunnel leading to the Underground. The bounty hunters cornered the slaves and killed them. To everyone’s astonishment, the slaves then rose from the dead. Over time, the bounty hunters chose to stay below ground, taking advantage of their new slave labor to build what they term “Paradise.”Their numbers are augmented by deathbed miners who are offered immorality in exchange for their subservience and labor.Below a town struggling to survive both the Great Depression and the closing of the local coal mine, there lives an immortal society built on the backs of slavery and pervasive immorality.
Hadley & Grace
Suzanne Redfearn - 2021
A woman who can’t even kill a spider, Hadley soon finds herself pushed to the limits as she fights to protect her family.Grace, new mother of baby Miles, desperately wants to put her rough past behind her for good, but she finds it impossible when her path crosses with Hadley’s, and her quest for a new start quickly spirals out of control and turns into a terrifying flight for survival.Stronger together than apart, the two find their fates inextricably entwined, and as the danger closes in, each must decide how much she is willing to risk for the other.A powerful story of self-discovery, Hadley and Grace is the heart-racing tale of two women facing insurmountable odds, racing to stay one step ahead of the trouble that is chasing them, and discovering new kinds of love and family along the way.
Sin Eater
Megan Campisi - 2020
Orphaned and friendless, apprenticed to an older Sin Eater who cannot speak to her, May must make her way in a dangerous and cruel world she barely understands. When a deer heart appears on the coffin of a royal governess who did not confess to the dreadful sin it represents, the older Sin Eater refuses to eat it. She is taken to prison, tortured, and killed. To avenge her death, May must find out who placed the deer heart on the coffin and why.The Sin Eater walks among us, unseen, unheard Sins of our flesh become sins of Hers Following Her to the grave, unseen, unheard The Sin Eater Walks Among Us.
The Handmaid’s Tale
meets Alice in Wonderland in this gripping and imaginative historical novel about a shunned orphan girl in 16th-century England who is ensnared in a deadly royal plot and must turn her subjugation into her power.
Under a Gilded Moon
Joy Jordan-Lake - 2020
The country’s grandest example of privilege, it symbolizes the aspirations of its owner and the dreams of a girl, just as driven, who lives in its shadow.Kerry MacGregor’s future is derailed when, after two years in college in New York City, family obligations call her home to the beautiful Appalachians. She is determined to distance herself from the opulence she sees rising in the Blue Ridge Mountains, however close its reach. Her family’s land is among the last pieces required to complete the Biltmore Estate. But something more powerful than an ambitious Vanderbilt heir could change Kerry’s fate as, one by one, more outsiders descend on the changing landscape—a fugitive from Sicily, a reporter chasing a groundbreaking story, a debutante tainted by scandal, and a conservationist prepared to put anyone at risk to stoke the resentment of the locals.As Kerry finds herself caught in a war between wealth and poverty, innocence and corruption, she must navigate not only her own pride and desperation to survive but also the temptations of fortune and the men who control it.
For the Love of Old Bones: and Other Stories
Michael Jecks - 2012
THE CORONER’S TALE In the remote Devonshire town of Crediton, a young girl is found dead in an alleyway, raped and murdered. As the local Bailiff and a visiting knight investigate the crime, it comes to light that the bailiff holds an incriminating secret – one that has the potential to place this agent of the government on the wrong side of the law. FOR THE LOVE OF OLD BONES A group of monks journeying from Launceston Abbey across the wild wastelands of Dartmoor are waylaid by brigands. During the brawl, their abbot is put to death at the blade of a knife, but the murderer neglected to steal his money filled purse. When the local bailiff discovers that the group are conducting a holy relic overseas to France, he begins to suspect that there are murkier motivations at play. THE AMOROUS ARMOURER A blacksmith is found dead in his lodgings, the door locked from the inside. As the town’s meticulously minded bailiff goes about his investigation, a veritable rogue’s gallery of culprits drift in and out of focus - but the guilty party is the least suspect of all. A CLERICAL ERROR One of the king’s forresters lies dead in a gully on the moor, his head smashed in with a rock, and the only witness to the murder being the forrester’s loyal mastiff, who stands vigil over his master’s body. As the list of suspects increases with every local rivalry which comes to light, the outcome of the case will surprise all involved. DANCE OF DEATH 1348, the year of the Great Death. Refugees flood into the city of Exeter from the plague-ravaged countryside surrounding the city. A man and a young boy from the village of Rookford arrive separately, yet both share knowledge of a horrifying secret and come to the realisation that even in these times of turmoil, the past is inescapable. Praise for Michael Jecks: "An instant classic British spy novel - mature, thoughtful, and intelligent ... but also raw enough for our modern times. Highly recommended." Lee Child, author of the Reacher series "More magic by the master of the medieval” - Quintin Jardine "Michael Jecks is a national treasure" -
Scotland on Sunday
“A textbook example of how to blend action and detection in a historical” -
Publishers Weekly
Michael Jecks is the author of the bestselling Knights Templar series, comprising thirty-two novels starring Baldwin de Furnshill. Fields of Glory is the first novel in a new trilogy, set around the Hundred Years' War. A regular speaker at library and literary events, he is a past Chairman of the Crime Writers' Association and a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund at Exeter University. He was shortlisted for the Harrogate/Theakston’s Old Peculier prize for the best crime novel of the year 2007, the year Allan Guthrie won. He lives with his wife, children and dogs in northern Dartmoor. To find out more visit his website http://www.michaeljecks.com, follow him on twitter @michaeljecks, or find him on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Michael.Jecks... Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com.