Welcome to the Age of Romance
When gentlemen dueled and slaves fought for freedom.
When pirates ruled the oceans, and soldiers still battled with cold steel.
When women were considered chattel, yet swayed the fate of nations.
When honor and courage were common currency.
When love wasn’t always convenient, but an inconvenient love could change history.
The Honor of His Name
by Alice Von Kannon
Sometimes a marriage of convenience isn't as convenient as it sounds . . .
When her tiny duchy is threatened by the nations at war around her, Chantal Saint-Marcq, Duchess of Valenciére, is obligated by duty to marry a cold and distant stranger, Major Tristan Duroc, hero of Austerlitz and power player in the game of Empire.
When these two willful people collide, the cold intrigue of a political marriage leads to the most dangerous passion in the age of Napoleon!
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Heart's Blood
by Alice Von Kannon
A sweeping story of love and redemption to open a new romance trilogy, To Cross an Unbound Sea.
Book One, Heart's Blood, is the unforgettable love story of Captain Isaac McCallister, five years a slave in Algiers, and Eleanor Hampton, gifted artist and a woman of tenacious courage. Together they will discover all the possibilities of passion, including a love strong enough to face down the darkest secrets.
Heart's Blood
More than a century has passed since the Salem witch trials, and the Puritan village in Massachusetts has become the wealthiest town in America, where a new breed of men has built a new kind of aristocracy.
He is a damaged man looking for a reason to go on living.
Captain Isaac McCallister, merchant prince, has come home to Salem after five harrowing years of slavery in Algiers. Isaac is a survivor of the desert and the madhouse, a man searching for a new life, and a reason to live it. He is a forgotten man, and his return from the grave has rattled Salem, particularly the family of his dead step-brother, three women living in genteel poverty on his estate. But from the moment he sets eyes on Eleanor Hampton, Isaac sees a path out of the darkness, back to the land of the living.
She is an independent woman looking for the courage to love.
Eleanor Hampton is a gifted artist and a stubborn, hidebound Yankee, struggling to make a name for herself as a painter and to support her mother and her young sister, Amelia. When Captain McCallister makes an astonishing offer of marriage, accepting seems like a practical matter for a woman born to the poor relations. Yet, despite the long-standing bitterness between the Hampton and McCallister families, Eleanor is increasingly drawn to this proud man, who hides the secrets of his captivity behind a wall she cannot breach. But the arrival in Salem of Isaac's rescuer and dearest friend, French diplomat François Déguerre, sets secrets free and events in motion, events that will end in a brutal murder. And as her growing passion for her enigmatic husband consumes her, Eleanor realizes she will go to any length to save Isaac from the hangman.
Heart’s Blood is a story of the resilience of the human spirit, and the power of love to heal the darkest wounds.
480 pages; Published by MCP Books
Paperback $8.99
Kindle 99¢ NOW ON SALE! (Reg. $2.99)
Heart's Blood is a 2024 Firebird Book Award winner in the category of Historical Fiction.
Alice VonKannon
Dolly Levi said if you're going to live hand to mouth, you better be ambidextrous, a motto for two writers who've been together for four decades, Alice VonKannon and her husband Chris Hodapp. Alice has done every imaginable writing job, from ad copy to cable-TV to a plethora of "For Dummies" books, on subjects from the Crusades to buying an RV. But what she writes for the sheer joy of it are the epic historical romance novels she's always loved. The result is a new trilogy, To Cross an Unbound Sea, three novels set in the early 19th century - Heart's Blood, Night's Bloom and A Price Above Rubies, which just won RWA's Hearts Through History Legend Award. She's incredibly excited over the reception they've been given, these three love stories, bound by family, playing out across three nations in conflict -Jeffersonian America, Napoleonic France and Regency Britain.
Alice has appeared on History, Discovery, and AHC channels.
Coming next in the Unbound Sea Trilogy
NIGHT'S BLOOM — coming IN January 2025
A PRICE ABOVE RUBIES — COMING IN SPRING 2025
A PRICE ABOVE RUBIES — COMING IN SPRING 2025
Amelia never meant to fall in love with someone she could never have...
Book Two, Night's Bloom, continues the story of the Hampton sisters on the other side of the Atlantic, in France, where the young Napoleon is about to be crowned emperor. What to do about the problem of Amelia has occupied the brand new McCallister family during their summer sojourn in Paris. With her hungry intellect, her Yankee stubbornness and a spirit far too free, Amelia is a handful. Worse, Eleanor is deeply troubled by the discovery of her sister's painful adolescent love for her husband's closest friend, the elegant French diplomat François Déguerre, a man entirely unsuitable. Hoping she will develope some maturity, as well as a bit of polish, Eleanor enrolls her sister in the Vevay Academy, a prestigious school for the daughters of princes and presidents. But when the idealistic American is sucked into the dangerous world of French politics, it is left to an exasperated Francois to rescue Amelia from an ugly riot on the Esplanade des Invalides. It will lead to a single night of seduction that changes the course of their lives, and it will end, across an ocean and a continent, in a steadfast love that changes the course of empires.
"Sexy, sweeping historical fiction with world-stage intrigue!” - Kirkus Reviews
A PRICE ABOVE RUBIES — COMING IN SPRING 2025
A PRICE ABOVE RUBIES — COMING IN SPRING 2025
A PRICE ABOVE RUBIES — COMING IN SPRING 2025
The war isn't really over just because the warrior came home . . .
Book Three, A Price Above Rubies, brings the years of conflict to a close in the story of Major Ashton DeWare, returning to England in a violent Channel storm after a decade of war. Miserably seasick, Ash jumps ship on the barren coast of Dorset, to find himself in a frontier both desolate and impoverished. Passing through a nameless village, he encounters a barbaric wife sale, and the remnants of English gentelman left inside the hardened professional solider prompts him to buy the pathetic child in order to rescue her. So begins their long journey together and the strange bond that forms between Ash and the wild, nearly primitive West Country girl, Bronwen, a person of courage and grit. She's an alien creature, product of a world he doesn't understand, even her language at times incomprehensible to him. Feeling the weight of responsibility, Ash decides to send Bronwen away to school, to gift her with a better life, while he works to take up his place in the earldom that should have been his brother's. A conflicted man, half American and half British, the new Lord Hawkston struggles to conceal the emptiness inside him, until Bronwen's unexpected return forces Ash to face the deepest truth of his existence.
Winner - RWA Hearts Through History Legend Award
Alice VonKannon goes hot writing as Stevie Prescott
"THESE WERE THE JOURNALS OF A REMARKABLE WOMAN, A WOMAN OF WIT AND INDOMITABLE SPIRIT..."
Hidden for two centuries, the diary of a sexual adventuress reveals the remarkable life of The Acolyte, Lady Létice Marie de Saint-Juste, the willful daughter of a wealthy planter on the island of Martinique. When young, headstrong Létice is sent to Paris by her father to be educated in a convent school, the vessel is captured by Salé privateers, and Létice is consigned to the alien world of the Ottoman seraglio in Constantinople, Passing through the Gates of Felicity, she is now the property of the mighty Padishah Sultan, Allah's Shadow on the Earth. She becomes Zarqa, the Blue-Eyed Woman, and her training for a new life in the harem begins. It will part a silken curtain to reveal a world unimagined. In a single, shattering night she becomes ikbal, a favorite, and from these heights she will learn the fearful weight of power within the seraglio.
Hardened by tragedy, Létice escapes, back to a world that now seems just as alien to her. Lost in the elegant salons of Paris and London, she abandons the Old World for America, arriving in its capital of sudden, glittering wealth, New York, determined to build a new life. But her well-laid plans have not counted on Jack McClain, powerful, playful, contemptuous of any rules but his own. Jack is a gamesman of unmatched skill, and as their contest unfolds, this Acolyte will finally find the tender Master who will teach her how little submission resembles defeat.
Caution: This book contains explicit sexual encounters and is recommended for adults only.
My Georgette Heyer Project
I have a mystery.
It began in 2017 with my discovery in an Edinburgh bookstore of a volume of Pierce Egan's 1823 revision of Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published at the tail end of the Regency period. The book itself was filled with handwritten notes and additions made by an unknown owner, additions that were clearly the work of an author and historian researching the Regency period. And some of the handwriting resembled notes I had seen before.
The more I explored, the more I recognized, and the more I began to ask myself a serious question: Had I discovered the incomparable romance author Georgette Heyer's earliest personal slang dictionary with her own private additions?
The answer is a resounding ... maybe.
