Showing results by narrator "Ell" in All Categories

Coolheaded Rose plans a royal tour to establish goodwill throughout the kingdom. But Wren balks—how can they gallivant around Eana when their grandmother Banba is imprisoned in Gevra? Impatient Wren steals away on a ship to the icy north, where King Alarik offers a deadly magical bargain in exchange for Banba’s freedom. Desperate, Wren agrees. But her spell has unexpected consequences. Meanwhile, when Rose's royal tour is interrupted by a mysterious stranger claiming to be from the long-lost Sunkissed Kingdom, the strands of destiny pull her south to the ancient Amarach Towers.

When Nora takes the train from London to visit her sister in the countryside, she expects to find her waiting at the station, or at home cooking dinner. But when she walks into Rachel’s familiar house, what she finds is entirely different: her sister has been the victim of a brutal murder. Stunned and adrift, Nora finds she can’t return to her former life. An unsolved assault in the past has shaken her faith in the police, and she can’t trust them to find her sister’s killer.

1547: Pedro Gonsalvus, a young boy living on the island of Tenerife, understands that he is different from the other children in his village. He is mercilessly ridiculed for the shiny layer of hair covering his body from head to toe. When he is kidnapped off the beach near his home, he finds himself delivered by a slave broker into the dangerous and glamorous world of France’s royal court. There “Monsieur Sauvage,” as he is known, learns French, literature, and sword fighting, becoming an attendant to the French King Henri II and a particular favorite of his queen.

Everyone knows the legend. Of Arthur, destined to be a king. Of the beautiful Guinevere, who will betray him with his most loyal knight, Lancelot. Of the bitter sorceress, Morgana, who will turn against them all. But Elaine alone carries the burden of knowing what is to come - for Elaine of Shalott is cursed to see the future. On the mystical isle of Avalon, Elaine runs free and learns of the ancient prophecies surrounding her and her friends - countless possibilities, almost all of them tragic.

Charm is a witch, and she is alone. The last of a line of conquered necromantic workers, now confined within the yard of regrown bone trees at Orchard House, and the secrets of their marrow. Charm is a prisoner, and a survivor. Charm tends the trees and their clattering fruit for the sake of her children, painstakingly grown and regrown with its fruit: Shame, Justice, Desire, Pride, and Pain. Charm is a whore, and a madam. The wealthy and powerful of Borenguard come to her house to buy time with the girls who aren't real.

Fourteen years ago, Delphine abandoned her prestigious soloist spot at the Paris Opera Ballet for a new life in St. Petersburg - taking with her a secret that could upend the lives of her best friends, fellow dancers Lindsay and Margaux. Now 36 years old, Delphine has returned to her former home and to the legendary Palais Garnier Opera House to choreograph the ballet that will kick-start the next phase of her career - and, she hopes, finally make things right with her former friends. But Delphine quickly discovers that things have changed while she's been away.

Wren Greenrock has always known that one day she’d steal her sister’s place on the throne. Trained from birth to return to the palace and avenge her parents’ murder, she’ll do anything to become queen and protect the community of witches who raised her. Or she would, if only a certain guard wasn’t quite so distractingly attractive, and if her reckless magic would stop causing trouble. . . .

The second daughter of the Queen’s close friend, the Scottish Duke of Buccleuch, Lady Margaret Montagu Scott is expected to make an advantageous marriage. But Margaret is an impulsive and outspoken girl in a repressive society where women are literally caged in corsets and required to conform. When Lady Margaret’s parents arrange a society marriage for her, she tries to reconcile herself to the match. But shortly before her betrothal is announced, Margaret flees, leaving her parents to explain her sudden absence to an opulent ballroom stuffed with two hundred distinguished guests.

Scotland, the 11th Century. Born in a noble household and granddaughter of a forgotten Scottish king, a young girl carries the guilt of her mother’s death and the weight of an unknowable prophecy. When she is married, at fifteen, to the Mormaer of Moray, she experiences firsthand the violence of a sadistic husband and a kingdom constantly at war. To survive with her young son in a superstitious realm, she must rely on her own cunning and wit, especially when her husband’s downfall inadvertently sets them free.

Fifteen years ago, a serial killer was on a rampage murdering young women in Middlehampton. Then, suddenly, the killings stopped, and the murderer was never found… So when the body of another young woman is found bearing the twisted killer’s unique hallmark—the overpowering stench of lavender and an origami heart—DS Kat Ballantyne knows this can only mean one thing: the killer is back.

She wakes up, goes to work. Watches the clock and checks her phone. But underneath this monotony there's something else going on: Something under her skin. Charting the feedback loop of memory, the senses, and modern distractions with wit and precision, our narrator becomes increasingly anxious as the day moves on: Is she overusing the heart emoji? Can drinking eight glasses of water a day really fix everything? Why is the etiquette of the women's bathroom be so fraught? How does she define rape? And why can't she stop scratching?

With the stroke of a pen, twenty-three-year-old Ivy Radcliffe becomes Lady Hayworth, owner of a sprawling estate on the Yorkshire moors. Ivy has never heard of Blackwood Abbey, or of the ancient bloodline from which she’s descended. With nothing to keep her in London since losing her brother in the Great War, she warily makes her way to her new home.

A lesbian in a lavender marriage, Jo Smith cuts a dashing figure in pin-striped trousers, working in her bookshop and keeping impolite company. But her hard-earned stability is about to be upended thanks to her husband’s pregnant paramour, who needs medical attention that no reputable doctor will provide.

In Roman-occupied Britain, the Iceni tribe crowns an extraordinary new queen. Tall and flame-haired, Boudicca is devoted to Andraste, the Iceni’s patron goddess, known for her raven familiar, her fierceness and her swirling blue tattoos. Boudicca and her two young daughters will carry the tribe forward in dangerous times. Roman tax collector Catus Decianus, expecting weakness in a female ruler, launches a devastating attack on the tribe’s stronghold. Boudicca and her family barely survive—but they refuse to bend the knee.

Lex Gracie doesn't want to think about her family. She doesn't want to think about growing up in her parents' House of Horrors. And she doesn't want to think about her identity as Girl A: the girl who escaped, the eldest sister who freed her older brother and four younger siblings. It's been easy enough to avoid her parents - her father never made it out of the House of Horrors he created, and her mother spent the rest of her life behind bars. But when her mother dies in prison and leaves Lex and her siblings the family home, she can't run from her past any longer.

Penniless and stranded in France after a bid to escape her cruel uncle goes awry, Cornelia Shaw is far from the Parisian life of leisure she imagined. Desperate and out of options, she allows herself to be recruited to Napoleon’s Grande Armée. As a naturalist, her mysterious ability to heal any wound with herbal mixtures invites awe amongst the soldiers…and suspicion.

Firestorm is down – the assassin for hire website that had the world by its throat, gone. Alek Konstantin, king of the underworld, is in hiding. But while the world celebrates, Winter is bracing for what must surely follow. All the world’s cut-throats, assassins and thugs are unemployed, roaming the globe without a leader - and nature abhors a vacuum. Something’s not right, and it’s not only that Winter’s body is in pieces. A boy held captive. An attempted assassination. Thirty men gunned down in rural South Wales.

It’s the 1970s, and from hippie London to Warhol’s Factory in New York, reluctant aristocrat Loulou de la Falaise is desperately seeking adventure. Having escaped an early, unhappy marriage, she arrives on a whim in Paris—the champagne-soaked heart of the fashion world, where the rigid old world of haute couture and the fast-paced new world of ready-to-wear are vying for supremacy. Glamour, sex, and cocaine nights fuel the Paris fashion scene. Its crown prince is the soulful and intensely gifted Yves Saint Laurent.

Edyth grew up in a quiet village with a loving family, before losing everything she holds dear in the blink of an eye. Suddenly sent to live in a priory and work with ancient texts, Edyth must come to terms with her new life and the gifts she discovers in herself. But outside the priory, something much worse is coming. With the reappearance of a boy from her past and the ominous Great Plague creeping closer and closer to the priory, it will be up to Edyth to rise above it all and save herself.

After the long journey from England, Ellis arrives in America full of hope. James Fort is where a better life will begin for her: where she will work as an indentured servant to Henry Collins and his pregnant wife, gain financial security, and fall deeply in love with bold, glorious Jane Eddowes. But as summer turns to fall, Ellis begins to notice the cracks in this new life—the viciousness of the colonists toward the Indigenous people and the terrifying anger Henry uses to control his wife and Ellis—leaving her to wonder if she has sentenced herself to a prison rather than a new home.