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  The Scarlet Letter

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

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  It is 1642 in the Puritan town of Boston. Hester Prynne has been found guilty of adultery and has borne an illegitimate child. In lieu of being put to death, she is condemned to wear the scarlet letter A on her dress as a reminder of her shameful act. Hester's husband had been lost at sea years earlier and was presumed dead, but he reappears in time to witness Hester's humiliation on the town scaffold. Upon discovering her deed, the vengeful husband becomes obsessed with finding the identity of the man who dishonored his wife. To do so he assumes a false name, pretends to be a physician, and forces Hester to keep his new identity secret. Meanwhile, Hester's lover, the beloved Reverend Dimmesdale, publicly pressures her to name the child's father while secretly praying that she will not. Hester defiantly protects his identity and reputation, even when faced with losing her daughter, Pearl. Hailed by Henry James as "the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country," Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is a masterful portrayal of humanity's continuing struggle with sin, guilt, and pride.

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  Death by Disputation

  Anna Castle

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  Thomas Clarady risks his life, his eternal soul — and his chastity! 
  Tom is recruited to spy on a group of radical Puritans at Cambridge University with Francis Bacon as his spymaster -- his tutor in tradecraft and politics. Their commission gets off to a deadly start when Tom finds his chief informant hanging from the roof beams. Now he has to catch a murderer as well as a seditioner. His first suspect is the volatile poet Christopher Marlowe, who keeps turning up in the middle of Tom's investigations. 
  Dogged by unreliable assistants, chased by lusty women, and harangued daily by the exacting Bacon, Tom risks his heart and soul to stop the villains and win his reward. 
  First In Category for the 2015 Chaucer Awards Elizabethan/Tudor period.

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  A Set of Six

  Joseph Conrad

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  Each of the stories in this collection is spun from a simple, if typically wry and bleak, idea. In "Gaspar Ruiz", a South American general who has fought in a war of independence tells his guests a long tale about a notorious strong man that explains the origin of his current domestic arrangements. "The Informer" leads the reader into the depths of a political conspiracy, dealing very slyly indeed with questions of truth and pretence. In "The Brute", we are asked whether we can believe there could be such a thing as a positively malevolent ship, while "An Anarchist" introduces us to an unfortunate man who has had a vision of society itself as malevolent and has not been able to rest in peace ever since. "The Duel", the most obviously likeable tale in this collection, recounts the history of an unfortunate feud between two officers of Napoleon's army that caused them to fight a series of duels over many years. "Il Conde" rounds out the collection, giving a new twist to the saying "See Naples and die".

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  Blood on the Crossties - The...

  James D. Brewer

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  Railroad detective Choctaw Parker works to solve all manner of murder-most-foul in Florida.In early February of 1885, the robbery of the Pensacola and Atlantic train could not have come at a worse time for Florida panhandle railroad magnate William Chipley. He had put time, money, and both his personal and business reputation on the line to host the first Gulf Chautauqua in DeFuniak Springs. Now, with the murder of two guards, and the theft of both a payroll and a shipment of new US Army rifles, the success of the Chautauqua was at risk. Chipley hires the half-White/half-Indian L&N railroad detective Jimmy Lee "Choctaw" Parker to investigate the crime, find the culprits, and restore confidence to those who would travel from all over the eastern US to attend the first month-long Florida Chautauqua. But Parker is not the only one investigating the robbery of the P&A, for he finds out very soon that he must work with—or in spite of—a pair of Pinkertons hired by the insurance company to recover the money, as well as an aggressive, vengeful, US Army Captain determined to recover the weapons and get justice for the two murdered soldiers. Parker, along with a long-time associate and a resourceful lady gambler, must navigate a web of politics, racial tension, Civil War grudges, and greed to bring to justice the culprits in this Victorian-era historical mystery.

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  Wolf of Wessex

  Matthew Harffy

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  AD 838. Deep in the forests of Wessex, Dunston's solitary existence is shattered when he stumbles on a mutilated corpse. Accused of the murder, Dunston must clear his name and keep the dead man's daughter alive in the face of savage pursuers desperate to prevent a terrible secret from being revealed. Rushing through Wessex, Dunston will need to use all the skills of survival garnered from a lifetime in the wilderness. And if he has any hope of victory against the implacable enemies on their trail, he must confront his past – becoming the man he once was and embracing traits he had promised he would never return to. The Wolf of Wessex must hunt again; honour and duty demand it.“Matthew Harffy's tale of England in the Dark Ages is nothing less than superb ... The tale is fast-paced and violence lurks on every page” -  HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY on Matthew Harffy.

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  Personal Recollections of Joan...

  Mark Twain

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  Mark Twain's work on Joan of Arc is titled in full "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte." De Conte is identified as Joan's page and secretary. For those who've always wanted to "get behind" the Joan of Arc story and to better understand just what happened, Twain's narrative makes the story personal and very accessible.The work is fictionally presented as a translation from the manuscript by Jean Francois Alden, or, in the words of the published book, "Freely Translated out of the Ancient French into Modern English from the Original Unpublished Manuscript in the National Archives of France." 
  It was originally published as a serialization in Harper's Magazine beginning in 1895 and later published in book form in 1896. However the Harper's editors decided to cut 12 chapters that describe much of Joan's Great Trial, saying the chapters were not suitable for serialization since, "They will not bear mutilation or interruption, but must be read as a whole, as one reads a drama." This recording contains the complete text!De Conte is a fictionalized version of Joan of Arc's page Louis de Contes, and provides narrative unity to the story. He is presented as an individual who was with Joan during the three major phases of her life - as a youth in Domremy, as the commander of Charles' army on military campaign, and as a defendant at the trial in Rouen. The book is presented as a translation by Alden of de Conte's memoirs, written in his later years for the benefit of his descendants.Twain based his descriptions of Joan of Arc on his daughter, Susy Clemens, as he remembered her at the age of seventeen.Twain said, "I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none." (Summary by Wikipedia and John Greenman)

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