New for 2020 — Heart's Blood

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.

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?