Books
The King's Shadow
Now published by Endeavour Press here.
Charles. The name of a king not yet on the throne. Until New Year’s Day 1660, few believe he ever will be. But on this icy morning, an army sets out from Coldstream to march on London. Is it marching to bring back the king?
Mark Denton, colonel of cavalry, is the most rigorous parliamentarian in York and the scourge of royalist conspirators across the North. He must find out what his commander, General George Monck, intends to achieve in London.
Lucinda Selby, in secret revolt against Parliament and its army, allies herself with a brilliant member of the exiled court and goes to London also—with a risky mission on the king’s behalf.
In an England riven by factions, the desires of the most powerful players are the more deadly for being concealed. Meanwhile, amongst the danger and mystery moves the King’s Shadow, the most enigmatic of them all.
Farewell Cavaliers
London, the winter of 1652. It is almost four years since King Charles I was executed. While Parliament dithers and Oliver Cromwell’s impatience mounts, an armed avenger stalks the streets and a series of murders threatens the highest echelons of government.
At the core of the mystery is Thomas Darke. He may have been a colonel in Parliament’s victorious army, but his one obsession is with a crime: the assassination of Colonel Rainsborough, the army’s foremost radical. He may work as a waterman on the Thames, but his secret activities touch the realms of power, where royalist still contends against parliamentarian and where John Thurloe, Cromwell’s spymaster, strives to lay hands on the fatal avenger. Darke may even tempt the heart of the beautiful Alice Hull—but can she give herself to a man whom death seems to pursue like a familiar?
This tale of revenge explores new aspects of two shocking events during the struggle for democracy in England: the assassination of Colonel Rainsborough in 1648, and the invasion of the House of Commons on 20 April 1653, when Cromwell dissolved Parliament in a military coup.
It is also a ghost story, following a driven, vengeful spirit through the rich and intimate lives of the people of London as he discovers, paradoxically, what it is to be human.
Murder at Cirey
A police-procedural murder mystery that enters the lists of historical crime with shock and suspense.
Eight days in spring, 1735
A race against crime.
When a handsome young man is shot dead on an estate in the picturesque Champagne region of France, Victor Constant, military policeman, determines to find out why. But no one else, including the local magistrate, seems willing to penetrate the mystery of this brutal death. Alone and against orders, Victor confronts the notorious free-thinker, Voltaire, who found the body. Victor fights to protect the innocent and bring the real killer to justice. A second murder occurs and Victor's task becomes doubly dangerous: unless he can strip bare the conspiracy behind this intricate series of crimes, he stands to lose his military career -- and his life.
A tense murder investigation by a military policeman who has all the audacity of a Jack Reacher.
La Créole
She is a slave on Martinique, called Ayisha by the Master of the plantation and Charlotte by the Master’s sister, who has whimsically taught her to read aloud in French. But there is nothing whimsical about the cruel, backbreaking life that Ayisha endures on the Caribbean island where fate seems to have imprisoned her for ever.
In 1755 this young and spirited woman rebels against her destiny and escapes with stolen gold. Against bitter odds, she makes her way to France. To avoid capture and prison, she must disguise her identity and her dangerous purpose—to revenge herself on the Master and free her people.
As Charlotte de Novi, Italian aristocrat, she uses a hazardous ploy to penetrate the echelons of wealth and power, but before she can exact her vengeance, two noblemen find out her secret. One is her deadly enemy. The other, Guy de Richemont, is in love with her and desperate to save her. In 1756, in the midst of the Seven Years War, Ayisha fights her last solitary battle for freedom.
Rebel
A woman at war with authority
A man at war with himself
They defy their king to fight for freedom
When the reckless and rebellious young Viviane de Chercy reaches Paris in 1776, she joins a band of aristocrats who are plotting to throw themselves into the American War of Independence.
She stows away on a ship carrying La Fayette and his followers to war-torn Pennsylvania, only to sail headlong into a passionate struggle with her nemesis, the man she fled France to escape—Jules, Comte de Mirandol, who has joined the Virginia Riflemen to fight for the same cause.
Siren
“We are credited with a fleet that Edward Teach himself would have given his black beard and liver to assemble. You are depicted with sea snakes in your hair and a voice like Circe’s, that has drawn me to a thousand crimes. And when we couple it is on the ocean bed, amongst Spanish bullion strewn with the skulls of the drowned, their eye sockets bulging with emeralds and rubies.”
Such is Jean Laffite’s ironical warning to privateer Léonore Roncival. But the danger is real, and more intimate than either dares to admit.
The Chase
It all begins in March 1815.
At Greenwich, a French emigré soldier of the Chasseurs Britanniques arrives in England—and is arrested and court-martialed. Is he a deserter, a royalist, or a spy?
In London, Lady Sophia Hamilton has private plans for the Prince Regent.
The Code of Love
Delphine Dalgleish is a Paris-bred Bonapartist who cares as deeply for the honor of France as she does for her island home on tropical Mauritius. But the ice-cool Sir Gideon Landor first meets her when he is a prisoner of war, and he is convinced that she is as empty as a piece of Sèvres porcelain. Then a midnight confrontation, a shock encounter in a Paris street, and her surprise arrival in London force them to recognize that they are both spies—on opposing sides of the war that Napoleon has unleashed on Europe.
They are trapped in a personal feud as complex and dangerous as a military campaign, that will take them in the end to war-torn Portugal and Spain. Their greatest danger lies in the passion that threatens to overpower them, menacing not only their lives but the armies of two nations.
The Winter Prince
The warrior prince who comes to save a kingdom
The royal duchess who fights to resist him
The Parliament of England brands them as lovers …
Prince Rupert of the Rhine and the beautiful Mary Villiers, Duchess of Richmond, clashed in 1642 when England was splitting apart into Civil War. Mary was a ward of the king, and she had her own hopes for saving the throne of England in the struggle with Parliament. The tall, handsome Prince Rupert chilled her with his thirst for glory and a genius for warfare that would destroy any chance of peace.