NEW FOR 2020
HEART'S BLOOD
by Alice Von Kannon
A sweeping historical tale of passionate love and harrowing secrets!
More than a century has passed since the Salem witch trials, and the Puritan village in Massachusetts is the wealthiest town in America, where a new breed of men have built a new kind of aristocracy.
He is a damaged man looking for a reason to go on living
Captain Isaac McCallister has returned from the grave, after five harrowing years of slavery in Algiers. His resurrection has rattled Salem, particularly the family of his dead step-brother, three women living in genteel poverty on his estate. And 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, by the standards of little Salem, an obstinate eccentric. Her life is the struggle to become a painter and to safeguard her mother and sister. As for romance, it’s brought only calamity, and Eleanor has long resolved to do without.
But from her first sparring match with Isaac McCallister, Eleanor knows she’s found a man more than her match in pride and determination. All Salem is astonished when Eleanor accepts his swift offer of marriage. And as her passion for her enigmatic husband consumes her, Eleanor will need that determination, as well as courage, to face down the threat out of Isaac’s past.
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)
THE ACOLYTE
by Alice Von Kannon 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. The young Létice is sent to Paris by her father, to be sheltered behind the high walls of a convent school. But the vessel carrying her to France is captured by Salé privateers, and Létice is set on an altogether different journey, into the alien world of the Ottoman Seraglio.
There, she becomes Zarqa, the Blue-Eyed Woman, and the training for her 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, where she’s determined to build a new life. But her well-laid plans made no account of Jack McClain, powerful, playful, contemptuous of any rules but his own. Jack is a gamesman of unmatched skill, and as the contest unfolds, this Acolyte will finally find the tender Master who will teach her how little submission resembles defeat.
Publisher’s Note: This romance is intended for adults only.
305 pages; Published by Blushing Books
Kindle $4.99 Paperback $13.99
My Georgette Heyer Project
I have a mystery.
It began in 2017 with my discovery at a Scottish bookseller's 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, and they were clearly the work of an author or a Regency period language enthusiast. 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?
Alice Von Kannon is an author and historian who's appeared on History, Discovery, and AHC. She is co-author with her husband Christopher Hodapp of books in the popular ''For Dummies'' series for Wiley publishing. Her new novel Heart's Blood grew out of her love for the town of Salem in the romantic age of tall ships.