-
-
The Second Son: Dynastic Disasters and Political Intrigue: England 1660
Price range: $3.99 through $23.99Luke, now the King’s special agent is sent to one of the home counties to assess the suitability of the shire’s gentry to represent the King across the county, in Parliament and on the bench. Luke finds a fractured Royalist community divided by family feuds, social class, generational disputes, and bitterness between those who went into exile with the King and those who remained behind and suffered under the Republic. The assessment is sidetracked by an alleged massacre, a disappearing Cromwellian magistrate, ambitious, conniving and predatory women, a vindictive husband, secret societies, the plague, closely kept secrets, man eating animals, and a spate of attempted and successful murders.
-
The Spanish Relation: Murder in Cromwellian England
Price range: $3.99 through $19.99Luke, Cromwell’s top agent spends late 1654 and much of 1655 in Somerset inquiring into the murder of an obscure squire. The victim’s family and village are deeply divided revealing a multitude of suspects-feuding relatives, corrupt politicians, Royalist supporters, Spanish agents, religious fanatics, a wanton witch, and a mysterious man in a golden cape
-
The Spanish Teacher
Price range: $3.99 through $10.99Winner of the Gival Press Novel Award
“…De la Cuesta’s novel maintains an accumulating power which holds onto a reader’s attention not only through the forceful figure of Ordóñez, but by demonstrating acutely how ordinary lives are impacted by the underlying social and political landscape. Compelling reading.”
-Tom Tolnay, publisher,
Birch Brook Press and author of Selling America and This Is the Forest Primeval
“Barbara de la Cuesta’s The Spanish Teacher has everything to thrill you-pace, a great balance of description, gesture and action, charmed, perfectly-tuned dialogue, and most notably, a character we follow as closely and sympathetically as if we were living right there inside the story with him… So many books show us a character who seems to capably hang and move like marionettes from the strings of a fairly competent puppeteer, but rarely do we see a full drama like this, where every bit of the writing extends from, grows out of, is part and parcel with the author’s complete realization of and connection to her character…”
-Don Berger, judge for the Gival Press Novel Award
-
The Toy Store Murders: A Jolene Mystery, Book 2
Price range: $3.99 through $21.99Owner of several Toy Stores which he built from scratch suddenly dies and his wife too. After careful investigation it was ruled murder. Then Several of the store managers begin to die also. They were killed or fired from their position as managers. Jolene is asked by the FBI to join them again to help close this 10-year cold case.
-
Trouble in Tangiers: Islamic Incursions, Portuguese Perfidy? 1661
Price range: $3.99 through $24.99In 1661 Charles II put an end to the diplomatic wrangle between European powers to provide him with a wife. He announced he would marry the sister of the disabled King of Portugal, Catherine of Braganza. As part of the marriage treaty Portugal ceded the strategic north African port of Tangiers to England in return for three thousand English troops to assist Portugal maintain its independence from Spain. The instability of both Portuguese and Moroccan politics and conflict within the city itself forced Charles to send his agent Colonel Luke Tremayne to investigate the general situation and forestall any attempts by Moroccan war lords to undermine English influence. Their possession of an emerald and silver ring becomes crucial to such an end.
Geoff Quaife, born and educated in Melbourne Australia has been a university lecturer, historian and academic administrator spending most of his working life in Armidale in regional NSW. He is the author of academic works on witchcraft and sexual and the fifteen earlier Luke Tremayne adventures.
-
Unknown Evil
Price range: $3.99 through $12.99Two NYPD Detectives get involved in a murder case that turns out to be the strangest case that Lt. Clancy and Lt. Rizzo ever tried to solve. There is a romance between Lt. Clancy and a woman named Susan Roselle who happens to be Lt. Rizzo’s cousins. The case takes the three of them on a strange chase above and below the City of New York.
-
What Happens Now
Price range: $3.99 through $10.99Major General Daniel Jorgensen and his family are back in Knoxville, Colorado where Dan is ROTC instructor at Knoxville College. Dan is hoping that the attacks on himself and his family are over. But having put over 200 in prison, and some on death row, for murder and a variety of other serious crimes, plus 10 dead, do you suppose that their might be a number of people after my head? Dan and his wife Grace are prepared for most attacks on their family. You would think that with the death rate of attackers during their attacks on Dan and family, that the attacks would drop off. Time will tell.
-
Whose Coffee Is It?
Price range: $3.99 through $10.99I met June Seese in a class on writing fiction. As a teacher, one of my biggest kicks was that moment when the writers first read something they’d written. It was a nervous time-many writers shaking inside, for the first time showing their work to strangers, sympathetic, but nonetheless, strangers. June was remarkable. What has flowered since was already sturdy, strong distinct. She read with a confidence that moved beyond the personal, a faith outside herself in the certainty of her work. Here was a writer who had risen to that essential power where her work becomes necessary to her, a gift as sure and heedless as her pulse. She was right on track, and would move, beyond discouragement or criticism or even appreciation, into the strength, that difficult ease that’s the mark of a writer who will continue regardless, achieving an undeniable, unmistakable voice.
What makes a writer? Originality, a delighted care for language, a commitment to push words into new music and finally into pure emotion. June has these gifts-and her writing’s strengths- toughness, speed, lyricism, observation acuity and, ultimately, a compassion that’s never unsteady, never weak-make her the best kind of writer-impatient, hip, timely and transcending.
-Paul Evans, Editor, Southline Press
-
