New Historical Book Titles June 2013

Starred book titles are books I will be reading for review or reading just for fun! Huge list this month!

June 2013

Patricia Bracewell, Shadow on the Crown, HarperCollins (1001: faced with Viking invasion, King Aethelred is offered Emma of Normandy as his new wife, but there are political factions at work)

Eli Brown, Cinnamon and Gunpowder, FSG (swashbuckling epicurean adventure set on the high seas in 1819)

Cate Campbell, Benedict Hall, Kensington (a wealthy Seattle family and their household staff face the challenges wrought by World War I and the dawn of a new age)

Elizabeth Chadwick, The Summer Queen, Sphere (first in trilogy about Eleanor of Aquitaine)

Tim Chapman, Bright and Yellow, Hard and Cold, Allium Press of Chicago (conflicted scientific ethics, economic hardship, and criminal frenzy, tempered with the redemption of family love, set in the present day and in 1930s Chicago)

Pamela Christie, Death and the Courtesan, Kensington (Regency historical mystery with a courtesan sleuth)

Anne Cleeland, Tainted Angel, Sourcebooks (game of cat and mouse set during the Napoleonic Wars)

Susan Crandall, Whistling Past the Graveyard, Gallery (coming-of-age story about a nine-year-old girl who runs away from her Mississippi home in 1963, befriends a lonely woman, and embarks on a life-changing roadtrip)

Anton DiSclafani, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, Riverhead US / Headline UK (a troublemaking heroine comes of age at a riding camp in Depression-era North Carolina)

Loren D. Estleman, The Confessions of Al Capone, Forge (biographical novel about the iconic American mobster)

Nigel Farndale, The Road Between Us, Transworld (dual time story about forbidden love set in WWII Europe and  present-day Afghanistan)

Maria Fiorato, Beatrice and Benedick, John Murray (love story set in 16^th-c Italy)

Elizabeth Fremantle, Queen’s Gambit, S&S (novel of Katharine Parr, last wife of Henry VIII)

Laurie Graham, The Liar’s Daughter, Quercus (girl investigates her mother’s claim to be Nelson’s daughter)

Sam Halpern, A Far Piece to Canaan, HarperPerennial (a Kentucky professor returns to the hills where he was raised and revisits old memories from 1945)

Graham Hancock, War God, Coronet (1519 as the Spanish fleet sails towards Mexico)

John Harwood, The Asylum, HMH US, Jonathan Cape UK (a gothic mystery of intense suspense and terror, as a lone woman, held against her will, is forced to regain her mind, to delve as deeply as she can into the void of her memory to uncover the story that will free her)

CC Humphreys, A Place Called Armageddon, Sourcebooks (novel of the fall of Constantinople in 1453)

Maggie Joel, The Second-Last Woman in England, Canvas (post-WWII story of a conventional middle-class woman who murders her husband and is sentenced to death)

Ken Kalfus, Equilateral, Bloomsbury (1900s astronomer seeks a mysterious Egyptian triangle that may be able to communicate with Mars)

Ben Kane, Hannibal: Fields of Blood, Preface (novel about Hannibal)

*Susanna Kearsley, The Firebird, Sourcebooks (time-slip novel; love, sacrifice, courage, and redemption set in modern times and 18th-century Scotland, France and Russia)

Hannah Kent, Burial Rites, Picador (1829 Iceland: a condemned murderess waiting for execution makes a confession to a priest that shows all is not as int seemed)

Philip Kerr, A Man Without Breath, Quercus (thriller set in 1943 when the Katyn Massacre is discovered in German-occupied Russia)

Stephanie Landsem, The Well, Howard (biblical fiction, story of the Samaritan woman’s daughter; faith, unexpected love, and heartbreak)

Annabel Lyon, The Sweet Girl, Knopf (literary novel of Aristotle’s daughter, Pythias, hoping to carve out a life for herself after her father’s death)

Jack Ludlow, Prince of Legend, Allison & Busby (latest in Crusader adventure series)

Henning Mankell, A Treacherous Paradise, Harvill Secker (based on the true story of a Swedish woman who ran the most famous brothel in Mozambique in the 1900s)

Shirley McKay, Friend and Foe, Polygon (latest in Hew Cullan mystery series set in 16thC St Andrews)

Kate Manning, The Notorious Life of Madame X, Bloomsbury (19^th-C testament of the notorious Madame X: midwife, female physician, distributor of obscene materials, abortionist, and the most hated woman in New York)

M.E. Mayer, Two For Joy, Head of Zeus (second in mystery series set in Byzantium in the 6thC AD)

Philipp Meyer, The Son, Ecco (panoramic novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American West; literary saga beginning in 1848)

John O’Connell, Baskerville, Atria (friendship, rivalry, and ambition during the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Victoria Owens, Drawn to Perfection, Hookline (set in the Welsh Marches during the 1750s, a story of double dealing in life, love and civil engineering)

S.J. Parris, Treachery, HarperCollins (latest in historical thriller series featuring Giordano Bruno, heretic, philosopher and spy)

Nick Rennison, Carver’s Quest, Atlantic (Victorian archaeologist turns detective to solve a mystery that involves the lost treasure of Philip of Macedon)

Michael Ridpath, Traitor’s Gate, Head of Zeus (story of the first plot to kill Hitler, ignited on the eve of WWII)

*Lucinda Riley, The Lavender Garden, Atria (love, duty, and desire, spanning Nazi-occupied Paris and the glamorous Cote d’Azur)

*Suzanne Rindell, The Other Typist, Fig Tree (a female typist at a New York police station in the Roaring Twenties becomes obsessed with the new woman in the typing pool)

Andrew Rosenheim, The Informant, Hutchinson (literary thriller involving investigation into Russian spies infiltrating USA government in the 1940s)

Eugen Ruge, In Times of Fading Light, Faber (story of one family over fifty years and four generations in East Germany)

Alex Rutherford, Empires of the Moghul: The Tainted Throne, St. Martin’s (fourth installment in the internationally bestselling historical adventure series set in the Moghul Empire)

Edward Rutherfurd, Paris, Hodder & Stoughton (fictionalised story of 1000 years of history of Paris)

Caroline Sandon, Burnt Norton, Head of Zeus (beginning in 1731, the story of the destruction of a dynasty by a man overwhelmed by obsession)

Simon Scarrow, The Gladiator, Overlook (novel of the Roman Legion, latest in his Macro/Cato series)

Gary Schanbacher, Crossing Purgatory, Pegasus (in 1858, in the wake of family tragedy, Indiana farmer Thompson Grey takes to the Santa Fe Trail)

Natasha Solomons, The Gallery of Vanished Husbands, Sceptre (after her husband vanishes, Julie joins the post-WWII art scene, falls for a reclusive artist but can’t rest until she’s found her husband – and made a surprising discovery)

Diana Wallis Taylor, Claudia, Wife of Pontius Pilate, Revell (inspirational fiction about a shadowy figure from the Gospels)

Julie Thomas, The Keeper of Secrets, Morrow (dual-period fiction set in prewar Berlin and the present, centered on a stolen violin)

Cindy Thomson, Grace’s Pictures, Tyndale House (faith, courage, and forgiveness in the story of an Irish immigrant in turn-of-the-20th-century New York whose interest in photography leads her into danger)

Henry Venmore-Rowland, The Sword and the Throne (working title), Transworld (second in series about a Roman aristocrat embroiled in the politics and war of AD69, the Year of the Four Emperors)

Kent Wascom, The Blood of Heaven, Grove (literary fiction spanning early 19th-c America)

Kerry Young, Gloria, Bloomsbury (story of love and redemption set in Jamaica, 1938)