New Historical Book Titles May 2013

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

May 2013

Jeffrey Archer, Best-Kept Secret, St. Martin’s (latest in Clifton Chronicles saga, bringing story up to the 1960s)

Patricia Beard, A Certain Summer, Gallery (debut novel set in an exclusive summer colony along America’s east coast during the aftermath of World War II)

Marlen Bodden, The Wedding Gift, Century (19^th-C Southern USA plantation owner gives his daughter the present of a slave girl who is also his daughter by a slave)

Melvyn Bragg, Grace and Mary, Sceptre (a son tries to recreate lost family history to shore up his mother’s fading memory)

Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol, Touchstone (latest Oscar Wilde murder mystery)

Courtney Angela Brkic, The First Rule of Swimming, Little Brown (a woman leaves her Croatian island home to search for her missing sister and confront her family’s hidden history)

Rhidian Brook, The Aftermath, Viking (tensions arising when a British and and a German family live in the same house in Hamburg in 1946 during the de-Nazification of Germany)

Sally Cabot, Benjamin Franklin’s Bastard, Morrow (novel of William Franklin, son of Benjamin and his mistress, who stayed a Loyalist during the American Revolution)

Christian Cameron, The Ill-Made Knight, Orion (chivalry and betrayal in the Hundred Years’ War)

Bill Cheng, Southern Cross the Dog, Ecco (literary fiction set in the Deep South in 1927)

Paul Fraser Collard, The Scarlet Thief, Headline (military adventure set in the Crimean War)

Gary Corby, Sacred Games, Soho (historical mystery set in classical Athens, 3rd in series)

Sarah Dunant, Blood and Beauty, Virago (story of the Borgias)

Jane Feaver, An Inventory of Heaven, Corsair (old lady reveals the secrets of a Devon farm she left London to live near after WWII)

Jane Finnis, A Bitter Chill, Head of Zeus (second in murder mystery series set in Roman Britain in AD 95 featuring Aurelia Marcella)

James Forrester, The Roots of Betrayal, Sourcebooks (2nd in Clarenceux King of Arms series of Tudor-era thrillers)

Iain Gale, Keane’s Company, Heron Books (latest in military adventure series set in the Peninsular War)

Rosemary Goring, After Flodden, Polygon (intrigue and romance in the aftermath of the Battle of Flodden, 1513)

Joanna Hershon, A Dual Inheritance, Ballantine (passion, betrayal, class and friendship in the lives of two generations, beginning in Cambridge, MA, in 1963)

Justin Hill, Hastings, Little Brown (second in series set around the Norman Conquest)

William W. Johnstone with J.A. Johnstone, Butch Cassidy: The Lost Years, Kensington (What if Butch Cassidy wasn’t killed in the infamous Bolivian shootout in 1908?)

Jeanne Kalogridis, The Inquisitor’s Wife, St. Martin’s Griffin (novel of Renaissance Spain)

Ben Kane, Spartacus: Rebellion, St. Martin’s (Spartacus and his ragtag army take on the mighty Roman army)

Barbara Kyle, Blood Between Queens, Kensington (Tudor drama, 5th in her Thornleigh Saga)

Philip Kazan, Appetite, Orion (a tale of love and longing set in 1466 Florence)

Jasper Kent, The People’s Will, Transworld (Part historical adventure, part vampire thriller – the fourth in the Danilov Quintet, set in Turkmenistan 1881)

Giles Kristian, Brothers’ Fury, Transworld (latest in series about a family torn apart by the English Civil War)

Dale M. Kushner, The Conditions of Love, Grand Central (a young woman learns all about the different kinds of love, set in the 1950s Midwest)

S.G. MacLean, The Devil’s Recruit, Quercus (4^th in thriller series set in 17thC Scotland featuring Alexander Seaton)

Eduardo Mendoza, Madrid 1936, MacLehose Press (English art historian is shown a secret Velazquez painting by Primo de Rivera’s daughter and gets involved as Russian assassin is sent to kill the Nationalist leader)

Philipp Meyer, The Son, Ecco (multigenerational literary epic moving between 1880s Texas and the oil booms of the 20th century)

Aly Monroe, Black Bear, John Murray (British spy Peter Cotton is sent to Manhattan as part of the British effort to build intelligence into the new UN, and wakes up in a private facility reserved for very special patients and veterans)

David Morrell, Murder as a Fine Art, Little Brown & Mulholland (literary suspense set in gas-lit London as a series of horrific murders paralyze the city)

Virginia Pye, River of Dust, Unbridled (the child of American missionaries is stolen by Mongol bandits in 1910 China)

Suzanne Rindell, The Other Typist, Amy Einhorn/Putnam (a new office girl gets people talking in 1924 Manhattan)

Erika Robuck, Call Me Zelda, NAL (novel of 1920s icon Zelda Fitzgerald)

M.J. Rose, Seduction, Atria (novel about a grieving woman who discovers the lost letters of novelist Victor Hugo, awakening a mystery that spans centuries)

Priscilla Royal, Tyrant Mind, Head of Zeus (latest in murder mystery series set in 13thC England)

James Runcie, Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night, Bloomsbury (Oxford 1955: latest in detective series)

Alex Rutherford, Serpent’s Tooth, Headline (latest in Empire of the Moghul series)

William Ryan, The Twelfth Department, Mantle (3^rd in detective series set in Stalinist Russia, 1937)

Jeff Shaara, A Chain of Thunder, Ballantine (novel of the siege of Vicksburg)

Aria Beth Sloss, The Autobiography of Us, Picador (1960s California, teenage best friends dream of lives beyond their mothers’ narrow expectations until a single act of betrayal changes everything)

Anne Easter Smith, Royal Mistress, Touchstone (the rise and fall of Jane Shore, the final and favorite mistress of Edward IV)

Victoria Thompson, Murder in Chelsea, Berkley Prime Crime (latest in Gaslit mystery series set in late 19th-c New York)

Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins, Viking (comedy, romance and adventure as a man searches for a woman he met in Italy during the filming of Cleopatra in 1962)

Tim Willocks, The Twelve Children of Paris, Jonathan Cape (Paris 1572, the Huguenot Massacre in the Wars of Religion)

Helene Wecker, The Golem and the Jinni, Harper (a mix of Jewish and Arab mythologies in the story of two supernatural creatures in 1899 NYC)

Fay Weldon, Long Live the King, St. Martin’s (2nd in Downton Abbey-style family saga trilogy, set at the time of Edward VII’s coronation)

Robert Wilton, Traitor’s Field, Atlantic (treachery and betrayal during the English Civil War)

Felicity Young, Antidote to Murder, Berkley (2nd in Doctor Dody McCleland series set in turn-of-the-20th-century London)