Plot summary (from the publisher): Only a few years before becoming a famous silent-film star and an icon of her generation, a fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita, Kansas, to study with the prestigious Denishawn School of Dancing in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone, who is neither mother [...]
Plot summary (from the publisher): London, 1940. Winston Churchill has just been sworn in, war rages across the Channel, and the threat of a Blitz looms larger by the day. But none of this deters Maggie Hope. She graduated at the top of her college class and possesses all the skills of the finest minds [...]
Plot summary (from the publisher): As the shadows lengthen over the June grass, all England is heading for Epsom Down—high life and low life, society beauties and White chapel street girls, bookmakers and gypsies, hawkers and thieves. Hopes are high, nerves are taut, hats are tossed in the air—this is Derby Day. For months people [...]
Plot summary (from the publisher): On June 8, 1968, as the train carrying Robert F. Kennedy’s body travels from New York City to Washington D.C., the nation mourns the loss of a dream. As citizens congregate along the tracks to pay their respects, Michael Colvert, a New Jersey sixth grader, sets out to see his [...]
Plot summary (from the publisher): Louis XIV is one of the best-known monarchs ever to grace the French throne. But what was he like as a young man—the man before Versailles? After the death of his prime minister, Cardinal Mazarin, twenty-two-year-old Louis steps into governing France. He’s still a young man, but one who, as [...]
Plot summary (from the publisher): JUNE 1860 — A new locomotive christened A Southern Breeze steams across the Carolina countryside carrying seventeen-year-old Jeb Bennett and his twin sister Rachel Leigh to the exhilarating promise of a summer in Charleston. While storm clouds gather over the landscape, fiercer storms rage inside the passenger cars. The tensions [...]
Plot summary (from the publisher): This classic romance novel tells the true story of the love affair that changed history—that of Katherine Swynford and John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the ancestors of most of the British royal family. Set in the vibrant 14th century of Chaucer and the Black Death, the story features knights [...]
Plot summary (from the publisher): It is the early 19th century, when European traders and adventurers first began to penetrate the forbidding Chinese mainland. And it is in this exciting time and exotic place that a giant of an Englishman, Dirk Struan, sets out to turn the desolate island of Hong Kong into an impregnable [...]
Plot summary (with spoilers): Told from the point of view of 23-year-old medical student Daniel Connor, the main story takes place in the post-Napoleonic Paris of 1815. Young Daniel is on his way from Edinburgh to assume a research position at the Jardin des Plantes under renowned scientist Georges Cuvier, carrying in his possession some [...]
Plot summary (from the publisher): In December 1893, Sherlock Holmes-adoring Londoners eagerly opened their Strand magazines, anticipating the detective’s next adventure, only to find the unthinkable: his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, had killed their hero off. London spiraled into mourning — crowds sported black armbands in grief — and railed against Conan Doyle as his [...]