Collection: Historical Fiction

"A glorious showstopper of a novel! With its glittering characters, intricately woven plot and chapters full of gorgeous Dior dresses, The Paris Gown will be turning all heads this year."--Natasha Lester, New York Times bestselling author of The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard

From perennially popular historical novelist Christine Wells, the delightful tale of three young women in 1950s Paris who share a single dazzling Christian Dior gown.

Paris, 1955

Three friends--Claire, Gina, and Margot--who parted as very young women with their whole lives ahead of them, reunite in Paris years later, determined to start life anew.

Parisian Claire has been working hard to become a Michelin-starred chef one day, but ever since the heady time she spent in the company of socialites Gina and Margot, her dream has been to own a Dior gown. This seemed like a far-off fantasy, until the eccentric and wealthy Madame Vaughn, who lives above Claire's family brasserie, abruptly leaves Paris, asking Claire to mind her apartment. More bafflingly, Madame Vaughn also makes Claire a very special gift: a stunning Dior gown.

Meanwhile Gina, a cool American blue blood, lands on Claire's doorstep nursing a broken heart and a broken engagement after her father lost all of the family money in a risky business venture. A journalist aspiring to be a novelist, Gina has returned to Paris in the hopes of pursuing her dream. But when her father begs her to attend the United States Embassy ball in the hopes of persuading Hal Sanders, her former fiancé, to invest in her father's new business venture, she is torn. She wants to help her father, but seeing Hal again will be exquisitely painful. And what on earth is she going to wear?

Warm-hearted Claire insists Gina wear the Dior gown to the ball, and after some hesitation, Gina accepts. At Dior for Gina's fitting, who should assist them but Margot, the friend they thought had gone back to Australia to be married. But Margot is living in Paris and working at Dior under an assumed name, and clearly, she is not happy to have been found.

Is their close friendship at an end? Or will the wonder and delight of the Dior gown bring these young women back together?

Gorgeous, perfectly fitted, lustrous and luxurious, the Dior gown has the power to change lives--as these three remarkable women are about to discover...

"Decadent French cuisine, a haute couture gown, and the streets of Paris create an elegant backdrop for this warm and uplifting story. In The Paris Gown, Christine Wells has lovingly crafted a tale of the resiliency of female friendship and the healing power of chasing one's dreams." --Stephanie Marie Thornton, USA Today bestselling author of Her Lost Words, USA Today bestselling author of Her Lost Words

"Wells excels at bringing midtwentieth-century Paris to life in a touching tale that emphasizes the value of true friendship." --Booklist

Set in the turbulent Romantic era, ESCAPEMENT is an arousing, through-the-keyhole glimpse into the private torment and ecstasy of creative genius.

Cristofer Vaughn's star is poised to rise. Everyone expects the dashing and gifted composer to claim the mantle of that foremost virtuoso--Beethoven--an expectation that terrifies the young artist as much as it drives him.

Walking into the fire with Cristofer is his housekeeper, Henri, a handsome and elusive young woman who takes pleasure in dressing as a man. Possessed herself of considerable talent, and a disturbing past, she faithfully guides her employer through the trials of artistic endeavor--while guarding his most closely-held secret.

But the pair's loyalty is threatened when a wealthy and ruthless patron grants Cristofer the commission of a lifetime, then unwittingly hires Henri--whom he believes to be male--to give piano lessons to his alluring wife.

The resulting entanglements rise to a dangerous pitch as Cristofer struggles desperately to conjure music while Henri is ignited by a passionate but illicit love affair. Soon the only hope for either friend's survival depends on one publicly exposing the other's hidden truth. A decision that will defy the bonds of art and friendship--and irrevocably transform all their lives--forever.

Written with extraordinary beauty and populated with unforgettable characters, this lush and cinematic tale is as poignant as it is seductive.

Tortured Echoes is Volume Two of the Resonant Earth saga that began in Broken Mirror.

Bioinformatics whiz Victor Eastmore at long last gains control over his frightening mirror resonance syndrome, but he still believes his grandfather was murdered.

Victor's best hope for finding justice lies in New Venice, a tourist town in the Louisiana Territories where his family's company is exploring new treatment options for so-called "Broken Mirrors" and the stim addicts who experience similar symptoms--blank outs, synesthesia, and euphoria. Only by confronting Samuel Miller, the MRS "patient zero" who was responsible for the Carmichael Massacre, can Victor learn the truth. To do that, Samuel must first be weaned off Personil, the drug that keeps his mirror resonance syndrome in check. Can Victor learn the data egg's darkest secrets without unleashing a violent madman?

Meanwhile, a cult dedicated to the sanctity and purity of human life disrupts New Venice with protests and vandalism. When they take an interest in stopping BioScan from medicating MRS patients, including Samuel Miller, Victor finds himself with unlikely allies and divided loyalties.

As pressure builds for the nations of the American Union to pass new legislation to control Broken Mirrors, Victor must become an effective advocate for people with MRS or risk being institutionalized along with them.

A fast-paced sequel to Broken Mirror, Tortured Echoes continues the sci-fi detective saga of Resonant Earth. In this installment, fans of Broken Mirror will finally get answers to their questions: Why was Jefferson Eastmore killed? How did it happen? Who was responsible?

Revisit the world of self-driving cars, stunsticks, brainhackers, and herbalism with Victor, Elena, Ozie, Tosh, and Karine, and several new figures that might help Victor chart a new course for his future, or condemn him to madness.

Mía Barrias is taking a break from managing the governor's re-election campaign to honeymoon in Carmichael, a small resort town in Semiautonomous California. But she wakes up to a nightmare--sleeping gas wafts through the town, self-driving cars run people down in the streets, and a man clad in black is killing people with a stunstick as he tells them to "Believe and Live."

Can Mía survive long enough to outwit the man behind the massacre and bring help to the people of Carmichael, including a special four-year-old named Victor Eastmore?

Believe and Live is a horrific short story and the explosive prelude to Broken Mirror.

Broken Mirror: the start of a psychological science fiction saga.

LGBT sci-fi that looks at genetic engineering and its social consequences.

Someone killed Jefferson Eastmore. His grandson Victor is sure of it, but no one believes him.

Diagnosed with mirror resonance syndrome and shunned by Semiautonomous California society, Victor suffers from hyperempathy, blank outs, and sensory overload. Jefferson devoted his life to researching and curing Broken Mirrors like Victor, but now that he's gone, Victor must walk a narrow path between sanity and reclassification-a fate that all but guarantees he'll lose his freedom.

With its self-driving cars, global firearms ban, and a cure for cancer, the world of Broken Mirror may sound utopic, but history has taken a few wrong turns. The American Union is a weak and fractious alliance of nations in decline. Europe manipulates its citizens through propaganda. And Asia is reeling from decades of war. Amid shifting geopolitical sands, Broken Mirrors like Victor find themselves at a crossroads: evolve or go extinct.

Tortured Echoes is Volume Two of the Resonant Earth saga that began in Broken Mirror.

Bioinformatics whiz Victor Eastmore at long last gains control over his frightening mirror resonance syndrome, but he still believes his grandfather was murdered.

Victor's best hope for finding justice lies in New Venice, a tourist town in the Louisiana Territories where his family's company is exploring new treatment options for so-called "Broken Mirrors" and the stim addicts who experience similar symptoms--blank outs, synesthesia, and euphoria. Only by confronting Samuel Miller, the MRS "patient zero" who was responsible for the Carmichael Massacre, can Victor learn the truth. To do that, Samuel must first be weaned off Personil, the drug that keeps his mirror resonance syndrome in check.

Can Victor learn Samuel Miller's darkest secrets without unleashing a violent madman?

Meanwhile, a cult dedicated to the sanctity and purity of human life disrupts New Venice with protests and vandalism. When they take an interest in stopping BioScan from medicating MRS patients, including Samuel Miller, Victor finds himself with unlikely allies and divided loyalties.

As pressure builds for the nations of the American Union to pass new legislation to control Broken Mirrors, Victor must become an effective advocate for people with MRS or risk being institutionalized along with them.

A fast-paced sequel to Broken Mirror, Tortured Echoes continues the sci-fi detective saga of Resonant Earth. In this installment, fans of Broken Mirror will finally get answers to their questions: Why was Jefferson Eastmore killed? How did it happen? Who was responsible?

Revisit the world of self-driving cars, stunsticks, brainhackers, and herbalism with Victor, Elena, Ozie, Tosh, and Karine, and several new figures that might help Victor chart a new course for his future, or condemn him to madness.

Japan, 1745, is a land under the iron grip of the Tokugawa shoguns. Roads are monitored, dissent stifled, and order maintained through blackmail and an extensive network of informers. Amid rumors of rebellion, Kurosawa Kinko-samurai and monk-is expelled in disgrace as the head music instructor of his Zen temple in Nagasaki. He begins an odyssey across Japan, dogged by agents and assassins from an unknown foe. Along his journey, Kinko encounters a compelling cast of merchants, ronin, courtesans, spies, warriors, hermits, and spirits, on a quest to redeem his honor. Inspired by the life of the historical Kurosawa Kinko (1710-1771), master of the shakuhachi flute and founder of the Kinko-ryu school, Song of the Samurai takes the reader on a richly-textured exploration of feudal Japan and the complexities of the human spirit.

Promises can be hard to keep, but Maggie McConnell is determined to keep the promise she made to her father before he died. She must win a scholarship to a prestigious art program, but her grief gets in the way as she struggles to find her artistic vision. When Maggie purchases an old tweed coat as inspiration, she never guesses this fur-collared coat will forever change the way she views life and her place in it. The coat awakens her muse, but also awakens something else: Maggie believes its previous owner haunts the coat. Dreams and visions give way to clues from the past, and then a Holocaust victim's tattoo appears on her arm. With the help of a steampunk-dressing school outcast named Taj, Maggie must decipher what the ghost wants her to discover, and in the process find herself.

When seventeen-year-old Giulia, the orphaned, illegitimate daughter of a Milanese nobleman, learns she's to be packed off to a life behind convent walls, she begs an astrologer-sorcerer for a talisman that will secure what she's certain is her heart's desire: true love and a place where she belongs. But does she really know the compass of her heart? The convent of Santa Marta is full of surprises, including a workshop of nuns who are creating paintings of astonishing beauty using a luminous blue mixed from a secret formula: Passion Blue. As Giulia's own artistic self is awakened she's torn: should she follow the young man who promises to help her escape? Or stay and satisfy her growing desire to paint?

This richly imagined novel of a girl's daring journey towards self-discovery transports readers into the fascinating world of Renaissance Italy where love and faith and art inspire passion--of many different hues.

Passion Blue is one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Teen Books

By the author of the acclaimed Passion Blue, a Kirkus Reviews Best Teen Book of 2012 and "a rare, rewarding, sumptuous exploration of artistic passion," comes a fascinating companion novel.

Artistically brilliant, Giulia is blessed--or cursed--with a spirit's gift: she can hear the mysterious singing of the colors as she creates them in the convent workshop of Maestra Humilitá. It's here that Giulia, forced into the convent against her will, has found unexpected happiness and rekindled her passion to become a painter--an impossible dream for any woman in 15th century Italy.

But when a dying Humilitá bequeaths Giulia her most prized possession--the secret formula for the luminously beautiful paint called Passion blue--Giulia realizes she's in danger from those who have long coveted the famous color. Faced with the prospect of a life in the convent barred from painting as punishment for keeping Humilitá's secret, Giulia is struck by a desperate idea: What if she disguises herself as a boy? Could she make her way to Venice and find work as an artist's apprentice?

Along with the truth of who she is, Giulia carries more dangerous secrets: the exquisite voices of her paint colors and the formula for Humilitá's Passion blue. And Venice, she discovers, with its gilded palazzos and masked balls, has secrets of its own. Trapped in her false identity in this dream-like place where reality and reflection are easily confused, and where art and ambition, love and deception hover like dense fog, can Giulia find her way?

This stunning, compelling novel explores timeless themes of love and illusion, gender and identity as it asks the question: what does it mean to risk everything to pursue your passion?

Studio accountant, Matt Latowski orders an erotic massage on the one-year anniversary of a bad break-up, but is surprised when the masseur calls him a couple weeks later to ask him out on a date. Unable to say no to a freebie, Matt begins a journey that eventually leads to his becoming a murder suspect.As the police close in on him, Matt is left with no choice but to turn the tables and become an erotic masseur himself in order to find the murderer. Along the way he meets Detective Aaron Tripp, sparks fly as Matt wonders whether the detective might be the murderer, or the murderer's next victim?"Marshall Thornton has created an impressive thriller that I very much enjoyed." Chocolate Minx, Literary Nymphs

A heart-wrenching and yet a heartwarming story of a young Sāmoan-Scottish girl and how she endured and survived 60 years of abuse. She shares her story and hopes more women and children will be spared from mental and physical abuse.

Two complete love stories in one beautiful book. Time travel... is just the beginning.

I never thought time-travel was real. Until it happened to me...

But isn't all fun and games. A woman in Victorian England is a commodity. She's owned. I'm no longer the powerful business woman I was just moments ago and on top of it all I'm controlled by a man who may destroy more than my heart.

My only chance for safety lies in Gideon Trumbull, a lionhearted--but evasive--duke.

What began as a compulsion to learn anything I could about him turns into an urgent need and I find myself in an inescapable new reality--a world in which I don't belong.

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Meanwhile... Gideon's brother Perry has likewise been caught up in an incident, finding a stowaway housemaid in his carriage as he's bound for London...

I plan to seduce the rake who refuses to touch me. Propriety be damned.

Getting him to teach me what love is... seems like just the right challenge to sooth my damaged soul.

He's poor. She's rich.

He's a sub. She's a switch.

It's not love.

It's a marriage of Kink-venience.

Gray is disowned by his family when his propensity for pain is discovered so he quits London for India to begin a new life in service to the Crown. But when his father and two older brothers are killed he's required by his Queen to return to London and take up the title of Warrick.

Now he's honor bound to the Warrick's contracts--including a marriage meant for his dead brother--and the first thing required of him is to meet his bride.

Lulu's in a scene with a client when she trips and falls, waking up in a strange house, surrounded by strange people. She thinks she's either part of an elaborate scene for another client or it's all just a dream. But she can't figure out how she got here and who this man is who makes her wish to live in this dream forever.

When she's given the choice between running and hiding or completing the marriage contract to Warrick she chooses to marry the stranger who has her wanting.

Warrick believes marrying Lulu is the best way to keep her safe but she compels this thing he buried deep inside threatening everything he's managed to obtain.

Not yet believing this life to be her new reality Lulu is careless with his emotions-- anything to keep him from discovering how much her own feelings frighten her.

As they begin this arrangement of husband and wife can these two--who've never known trust or love--learn to submit to each other?

She had no idea what passion was,

Until she saw them...

Lady Alain needs a husband, and Lord Quintin Wyntor will do just fine.

She wants to offer him a mutual agreement of respect and independence--

As long as he never visits her bed to claim his marital rights.

She follows him to do just that but ends up with so much more.

Seeing him with a man, with Calder, changes everything she knows.

For better, and for worse.

Passion yet unknown to her is stirred. Desire never before experienced is ignited.

Even so--she never wants to touch or be touched by another.

Quinn doesn't understand what she's telling him and when his heart is shattered because his lover walks away he decides to explore his feelings for Celeste to ease his broken heart.

In one unchecked moment of passion a mutual need spins out of control and changes both of their lives forever.

Now a future for Quinn with Calder may be impossible.

Will Celeste give in to what Quinn wants for her or will she stand her ground, gain her own happiness, and help Quinn find another way?

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This book is the story of Celeste and has her happily for now.

It's also the beginning of Calder and Quinn's story which is continued in THE SPARE AND THE HEIR.

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Warning: this book has a cliffhanger ending for Calder and Quinn and is very much part of their story.

Warning: this is so much more than just a kissing book.

Warning: You're going to fall in love, and it's going to hurt.

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BOOKS IN THE LORDS OF TIME SERIES:

THE RAKE AND THE RECLUSE

THE DUKE AND THE BARON

THE DUKE AND THE DOMINA

THE TROUBLE WITH GRACE

THE SPARE AND THE HEIR

THE SADIST AND THE STOLEN PRINCESS

THE LADY AND HER SECRET LOVER