The tumultuous 1906 earthquake makes up the backdrop for the historical fiction novel San Francisco by Marian Lindner. Anna O’Malley was born into a life of privilege, her father a renowned jeweller. However, she finds the middle upper class lifestyle stifling, and her mother’s insistence...

The Quartermaster & the Marquis' Son by A.E. Kendall is a historical LGBT romance that will take you onto a pirate ship and show you life on the high seas. The story follows Galen and Michel. Galen, the 26-year-old Quartermaster of Fair Wind, hasn’t had...

And the Wind Whispered by Dan Jorgensen contains several scenes that are so exciting that they become almost impossible to put down. The discovery of a dead man’s body in a cave by a trio of young reporters gets the ball rolling. Later there is...

The Portuguese Affair by Ann Swinfen is the third installment of The Chronicles of Christoval Alvarez series. The story picks up after Queen Elizabeth's dispatch of the English fleet to Iberia in 1589. England and Spain are at war. Christoval Alvarez, the protagonist, was Jewish...

The Girl Immigrant by Patricia Ruiz Steele is a wonderful biography of the author's family, specifically Manuela, the author's grandmother. Manuela's family comes from Spain, and they were promised a new life, education for their children, homes and jobs, if they immigrated to Hawaii to...

Secrets of Sand Mountain is a coming of age novel written by Philip Elrod. Campbell Crossing is a tiny town nestled in the Appalachian Mountain Range on Sand Mountain in Alabama. Mostly it’s a farming community, and in 1944, at the time this story begins,...

What I believe to be the second novel in the Mary Fisher Pentalogy, One Little Word by T.A. Peters is a fascinating tale set in nineteenth century Florida. Mary, an exceedingly tall woman with large hands and feet, assumes the role as husband to the...

The Sins of Soldiers by S.J. Hardman Lea is a captivating story of love and loss during the First World War in 1916. Anson Scott is an American reporter embedded undercover in a British infantry regiment on the Western Front. He watches and writes his...

Ivory Shepard, known as The Razor, narrates her own story in P.S. Bartlett’s Demons & Pearls (The Razor’s Adventures Book 1). It opens when the pirate ship, Demon Sea, attacks a merchant vessel. Not satisfied with taking her cargo, Captain Barclay commands that her crew...

Kurinji Flowers by Clare Flynn follows the unfortunate life of a middle class Englishwoman, Ginny Dunbar. Immediately after her father's death, young Ginny is sexually exploited by Rupert, a painter and family friend. Due to the older man's vindictive and callous actions, Ginny's reputation and...